Page 45 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Gender and Sexuality 29

culture over time. Strong “ masculine ” women are portrayed as Medusas
or witches who harm men. Only in recent years have lesbian women been
accepted at least in some cultural regions. In others, women are still
expected to be passive and subservient, and signs of independence
and strength, such as wishing to choose one ’ s own spouse, are punished,
oftentimes violently. In South Asia, hundreds of women are murdered or
mutilated each year for disobeying male relatives and “ dishonoring ” them.
In studying the culture of gender and sexuality, we necessarily explore
a realm of oftentimes troubling and occasionally dangerous feelings. It is
also a realm of power, where groups subordinate other groups along gender
lines and in terms of access to the resource of sexuality. But gender and
sexuality have always also been areas of enormous human creativity and
play, where both the natural drive to reproduce humanity and the urge
toward pleasure through and with others are on display.
The cultural realm of gender and sexuality extends from deep within
the human mind to billboards and television commercials that exist in
communal public spaces. The constant along that range is the way affect
and image are welded together in human experience both within the private
realm of cognition and in the public realm of cultural representation. What
ends up on the billboards and the commercials is what is deeply felt by us.
And what is most deeply felt is a mix of chemistry and image. The mind
works by translating feelings into images in cognition. That explains why
cultural images, especially those dealing with profound feelings of the kind
that are linked to gender and sexuality, can have such a strong effect on us.
Those images evoke powerful feelings because they are linked in their crea-
tors ’ minds to profound feelings. As much as represent real men or women,
they give expression to inner feelings and emotional states. All of this helps
explain why culture is in a sense nature. Genetically determined biological
and chemical processes express themselves in our minds as words and
images that bear affect and communicate feelings from the physical realm
into the mental and cultural one. Mental images are thus like gateways that
conduct non - mental processes and states into the realm of cognition and
conscious awareness. When those images are made public, they become
our culture, and in our culture, images of men and women and of sexuality
especially can move us profoundly because of their origins in our deepest
selves. Images of sexually attractive men and women ’ s bodies elicit sexual
desire because they are already embedded with such desire.
Horror movies, for example, are a form of cultural imagery embedded
with emotion. They evoke powerful feelings and are often characterized by