Online Response #3

         As I watched Hunger Games this time around, I was much more drawn to the dialogue concerning the ridiculousness of the games themselves. I found many intersections with the conversations we have been having in class together. I was not, however, thinking about the portrayal of feminism in the film as I watched. I was expecting the readings to be about governmental abuse of media as a means of propaganda or brainwashing a nation's people. Afterwards I began to draw connections between those two ideas. Particularly McRobbie's article on Post Feminism pointed me in that direction. She noted that there is a growing distance between young woman and feminism. It has become a feared word, and an unpopular status in society. She offered one reason why the media has had a strong hand in this distancing that I found prevalent in Hunger Games and that is the idea of individualization. It is, essentially, the whole theme behind the game itself. Every man for himself and may the best man (and I should say woman as well) win!

McRobbie says:
"success which seems to be based on the invitation to young women by various governments that they might now consider themselves free to compete in education and in work as privileged subjects of the new meritocracy. Is this then the new deal for, in the UK, New Labour's "modern" young women, female
individualisation and the new meritocracy at the expense of feminist politics?"

        This is a reflection of Katniss' experience in the games. She was part of an outcast group, but given special permission to perform and rise in rank within the given boundaries. She then leaves behind the ideals of feminism and sacrifices it for the ideals of personal achievement.
        Both articles talked about women being "objects of the viewers gaze." Braudy went so far as to say that in many cases the female in films has little if anything to do with the story's progression and is merely a side show or pit-stop for the viewers and the story is temporarily put on hold. A perfect example of this was in McRobbie's article. She explained the 1990's "Wonderbra" billboard ads that depicted a woman in the bra with a look of surprise at her cleavage. The words read "Hello Boys." She called this tactic the self aware sexist ad. People who see it laugh because they understand the history behind sexism and see it as a blatant disregard of that history and in turn ridicule the people who are offended by the image and dismiss that moral standard as a thing of the past. I recently watched a documentary about the history and theory behind graffiti called Bomb It. It bought up some similar issues. One heavily argued topic was about the idea of public property and who was entitled to put up images in those places. Some people hated the graffiti and saw it as intruding and defacing property. They complained that they didn't like that style of art, so why should they have to look at it. The graffiti artists then used that same argument to justify their work. They asked why only those in power and money had the right to throw images in our faces with billboards, posters, commercials, and even architecture? They bring up a powerful point. People with money and power are in a position to perpetuate the idea of women as "subjects of the gaze."