Panopticism In The Day I Became A Woman

This analysis will examine the following focal points, panopticism, scoptophilic instincts, and visual pleasure. First, the analysis will examine panopticism in relation to embedded “secret politics” within the film, The Day I Became a Woman. Second, the analysis will compare both scoptophilic instinct with visual pleasure. In Chapter Five, Panopticism, which appears in Visual Culture: the reader, Michel Foucault explores the, “generalized model of functioning”, when defining panopticism. Foucault describes the plague which occurred in the seventieth century. In the attempt to control the outbreak of the plague, the town enforced strict isolation which is defined as disciplinary projects. “it called for the massive, binary division between one set of people and
The eyes are used as sexual foreplay. “Since sight is the sense by which human beings are mainly guided, we must regard it as the chief agent in the production of fore pleasure, through all the same time, we must remember that it is precisely in the realm of sensuality that the so-called lower senses are most prominent” (Fenichel, 1999). The definition of Scopophilia is the pleasure of looking. This definition could coincide with Chapter Twenty-Five, where Mulvey discusses visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Chapter Twenty-Five Mulvey discusses the pleasures of looking, and how film producers utilize this to create films. Mulvey explains that the instinct of looking can be defined as the “construction of ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person or object” (Mulvey, 1999). Mulvey explains that the viewer seeks satisfaction in a dark auditorium, and the contrast between the light and dark stimulate an illusion of “voyeuristic separation” (Mulvey, 1999). The women in the films are displayed as sexual objects and