My favourite thing about queer/cultural studies has always been that everything has scholarly relevance, if you look for it… I would love to hear somebody’s Foucauldian analysis of this clip!
The clip is amusing simply for the fact that the Teen Wolf editor missed this man exposing himself, which, in many ways, is more scandalous than the “penis controversy” surrounding the video box cover for Disney’s The Little Mermaid: http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Disney/Mermaid.html
As for the clip’s scholarly significance, maybe we can apply an inversion of Laura Mulvay’s gaze theory (found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”) and argue that the man who briefly pulls his penis out of his pants is both empowered and enslaved to the power of the camera lens, as he taps into our culture’s contradictory festishization and occluding (in art and media) of male genitalia. What I’m saying is that if we did not attribute such power to men’s penises, then perhaps rapists would lose a significant portion of their agency once the repeated image of their weapons of sexual destruction has been visually disseminated and deconstructed by the media and its consumers.
In answer to Dr. Lothian’s request, we can likewise apply Foucault’s “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (45) to the man’s action in that he derives pleasure from the act of exposing himself to the camera and evading the film editor’s eye, which, in turn empowers him, perhaps reaffirming his shaky masculine identity. We the viewers, or more specifically, the eagle-eyed viewer who originally detected this action, in a reciprocal fashion, experience pleasure in observing his behavior, leading, for some, a sense of power in critiquing and condemning the man as a pervert.
TP, remind me: is there scholarly relevance to this, or is it just for amusement?
My favourite thing about queer/cultural studies has always been that everything has scholarly relevance, if you look for it… I would love to hear somebody’s Foucauldian analysis of this clip!
TP, remind me: is there scholarly relevance to this, or is it just for amusement?
The clip is amusing simply for the fact that the Teen Wolf editor missed this man exposing himself, which, in many ways, is more scandalous than the “penis controversy” surrounding the video box cover for Disney’s The Little Mermaid: http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Disney/Mermaid.html
As for the clip’s scholarly significance, maybe we can apply an inversion of Laura Mulvay’s gaze theory (found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”) and argue that the man who briefly pulls his penis out of his pants is both empowered and enslaved to the power of the camera lens, as he taps into our culture’s contradictory festishization and occluding (in art and media) of male genitalia. What I’m saying is that if we did not attribute such power to men’s penises, then perhaps rapists would lose a significant portion of their agency once the repeated image of their weapons of sexual destruction has been visually disseminated and deconstructed by the media and its consumers.
In answer to Dr. Lothian’s request, we can likewise apply Foucault’s “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (45) to the man’s action in that he derives pleasure from the act of exposing himself to the camera and evading the film editor’s eye, which, in turn empowers him, perhaps reaffirming his shaky masculine identity. We the viewers, or more specifically, the eagle-eyed viewer who originally detected this action, in a reciprocal fashion, experience pleasure in observing his behavior, leading, for some, a sense of power in critiquing and condemning the man as a pervert.