Reading Response 2: de Lauretis

I found de Lauretis essay to be an interesting yet confusing read. It’s hard to grasp what she’s trying to say in a lot of the essay because she circles around a topic and uses multiple sources without properly explaining them. Sometimes I felt like I was reading a puzzle or a tongue twister due to how she tried to convey a point and how wordy her sentences were.

I agree with her when she says that there is a problem with Althusser’s statement, “ideology has no outside”. When he says outside I think he’s referring how people can’t see things from an objective point of view because they’re trapped within their own ideology and believe in their decisions. de Lauretis disagrees and says there is an outside where ideology can be seen for what it is. Often people feel that science is the only thing that can be logical but de Lauretis argues that people can look at a subject and be rational about it, in this case it’s about gender.

I think she brings feminism to a whole new level that I never thought of and I also find it quite silly at the same time. She talks about how when we fill out forms guys and girls check out the female and male box and therefore define themselves as being of that gender.  She talks about how when we marked that F on the form you are not only marking that form but also marking yourself and how that mark sticks to us. I feel that she’s viewing female as being a negative thing. She seems to want to break away from these labels and not have the existence of female and male but it’s only normal that people who are essentially different in certain ways are labeled differently. I don’t see myself being female as a bad thing, it’s just like how we have labels for everything else in this world, in race, ethnicity etc. For me when I think of feminism I don’t think of wanting to be the same as men. There are just certain things where we would like to have the same privilege to.

Once again she seems to not want to accept the differences between a male and a female when she says. “In other words, only by denying sexual difference (and gender) as components of subjectivity in real women, and hence by denying the history of women’s political oppression and resistance, as well as the epistemological  contribution of feminism to the redefinition of subjectivity and sociality, can the philosophers see in “women” the privileged repository of “the future of mankind.” The fact is, men and women do have differences. Personally I’m okay with those differences and don’t expect us to the same in every single way. One thing I do think she brings up a good point in regards to feminism and technology are movies and how they play a role in setting up this gender role. Movies often portray this cliche idea of how women and men should be and the mannerisms depicted in these movies are then brought into society once again.