The excerpt we watched in class from Showcase's The L-word has stayed in my mind for longer than I probably would have liked. Was I shocked? Yes. Was the feeling tactile? Definitely - my heart raced and I was terrified. But as the rape scene between lesbian lovers created a tactile space for me, did it do the same for everyone in the class? The simultaneous contemplation we experienced is something that I have been intrigued by for years. The whole "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is one of the most believable cliches out there I think. I find that everything (not only in the art world) is so subjective, that no matter how outraged or frightened that rape scene made me, I'm sure the person sitting to my left had a different take on things.
A point that I could not help but think about is the scene from Unfaithful with Diane Lane. A similar thing happens, although here in a heterosexual space, where the male partner forced himself upon his mistress. She eventually "gets into it" and allows him to have his way with her. So why then was I not so "shocked"? Was it perhaps that I didn't have the "heightened presence of mind" to cushion what I was looking at? Was it because it was between a man and a woman, and the woman was the victim to which we are so accustomed to seeing? Was it slightly arousing or outright horrendous? The frustrating point is, that everyone puts a different subjectivity on what they view, and through popular selection and agency, skews the idea even further.
This leads me to the idea of mass and popular culture being different, yet completely reliant on each other. If our practice in daily life not only relies on but is a result of commodities and products I can only ask myself WHO is creating this mass culture for me and everyone around me to gobble up (mmm turkey). If I can use popular discrimination to decide what I will buy into and what I won't, then how is it that someone is still spoon feeding me a commodity that I'm not even really sure I "need". And sure Fiske makes a great point that popular culture is seen as "pleasure" but then who gets to decide what is pleasurable for me? If they are the "all knowing" and can in fact determine what the great mass of individuals deem as false needs, then why can't we all use our better knowledge and see right through this capitalistic ploy? Do we really need brainless "excessive" ideas that have "escaped the control of the norm" to pleasure us (see The Simpsons)? I'm asking too many questions. All I have to conclude with is let not only these blogs, but those who they reach and those who engage in them become what (or whom) Fiske calls "the people". I want us to be (even though I think we are inherently in this WST class) those individuals who do shift away from the norm. We have to be the non-compliant resistance to dominant discourse. Because if we weren't all of these things, if people like that ceased to exist... I cannot imagine the "rape" that would occur of mass culture being forced upon us against our better judgement