Today was my first day back and I had my first contextual studies lecture. It's slightly different this year in the way that I have two lessons for contextual studies a week, it carries on throughout the whole year and different lecturers teach us each lesson.
I was a little confused about the lecture today but I think it was because the room that we were in was a little big for the amount of people that were in the lecture and the ladies voice was echoing around the room but after looking back through the lecture and doing a bit of research since being home I have understood a bit more. The topic that we spoke about today was Gender and Sex in relation to the concept of Power.
The lecture started with a question. Who watches the watchmen? At first I didn't know who the watchmen were but since being home I have researched who the watchmen are and it turns out it is a title related to the phase 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes,' which is a Latin phrase from the Roman treatise Satires of Juvenal which is translated into many different translations such as 'Who watches the watchers?' 'Who will guard the guards?' It's basically a question asking who polices the police? This then got me thinking, do we as citizens have a place in society to do this? I guess we do, we have to help the police for example to some aspect because they can't be around evytime crime is happening so it's my job for example that if a crime was happening to report it to the police.
In the lecture we then went on to talk about Deviant Sex. Prince was used as a metaphor for this. We watched a music video from Prince's 1984 album, Purple Rain called Darling Nikki which has a parental advisory sticker on the album due to Tipper Gore complaining that she heard 'filth' on her daughters copy of Purple Rain. This was the catalyst to Gore's formation of 'Parental Music Resource Centre'. In the music video there was a lot of sexual references and actions but myself and the majority of the class agreed that it wasn't anymore sexualised than modern music nowadays.
We then spoke about moral panic. The aspect of the moral panic we were looking into was an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening in regards to Prince and Tipper Gore. In April 1984 US researchers announce their discovery of the AIDS virus. By June that year Prince releases his 6th album, Purple Rain which sells over 20 million copies and gives Prince two US number one singles with 'When Doves Cry' and 'Lets Go Crazy'. December was when Tipper Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Centre in response to the 'filth' as she described it, on her daughters copy of the album. By the sounds of it in my opinion Gore is a little bit dramatic over the whole situation but I do get that she is only looking out for her daughter.
Once we had spoken about Prince and his controversial album we moved onto talking about 'is gender a social construct?' still on the topic of Prince however. Prince was a very eccentric man and was different to the 'stereotypical' people that lived in that era and even the era now even though he's sadly not with us anymore. Prince did what is known as 'gender bending' where through outfit choice, singing style and performance he showed his major cultural impacts. During his life he changed a lot of things and made people think about a lot of things. He had an affect on Frank Ocean as in 2016, the year Prince died Ocean wrote, 'he was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee high heeled boots, epic. He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irrreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity etc. He moved me to be more daring and intuitive with my own work by his demonstration - his denial of the prevailing model'. This is showing just how much Frank Ocean respected Prince for what he did over the years and it was a lot, maybe not what some people would agree in. I'm sure that Ocean came out with these words once Prince had unfortunately passed away.
This then made me want to research further into Gender nowadays because it definitely is more male dominated in the sense of men being paid more and men having the more 'powerful' jobs for example a builder as women aren't seen as being capable to do jobs like that. I really want this to change as I completely disagree with this and really want this to change. I don't understand why women are so different from men.
We all then got given some questions to answer but at this moment in time I don't feel I can answer them because I haven't yet started any imagery for my Weird and Wonderful brief but I'm hoping I can come back to these questions at a later date.
Self reflection questions:
How does my work fit into these themes?
What am I challenging/conforming to within these themes?
What does the dominant culture look like for me and how am I addressing this in my work?
What is my privilege and bias - how can I address this in my work?
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