Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey
Mulvey suggests that the conventions of Hollywood narrative are deeply ideological: they naturalize male subjectivity and female objectivity, making women’s “to‑be‑looked‑at‑ness” seem normal. She wants to open up space for alternatives: cinema that doesn’t prioritize male voyeuristic/fetishistic pleasure, that breaks the spectator’s easy identification with male characters, that discloses the camera’s look, that treats women as subjects, not objects. The pleasure derived from mainstream cinema comes at the cost of reinforcing patriarchal structures. To change that, disruption in form is needed: perhaps avant‑garde or feminist filmmaking practices; the male gaze, two modes of visual pleasure (fetishistic scopophilia and voyeuristic scopophilia), active/passive and subject/object division, how cinema manages anxiety and maintains the structure, and cinema as a “political weapon.”
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Atlantic Monthly)
Coates argues that the United States owes reparations to Black Americans not just for slavery itself, but for continuing, systemic injustices (through Jim Crow, housing discrimination, lending fraud, etc.) that have persistently deprived Black people of wealth and opportunity. These aren’t just historical “wrongs of the past,” but harms whose effects persist today. Reparations are framed as both moral necessity and a path toward national healing; historical continuity of theft and discrimination, housing discrimination as a major mechanism of wealth disparity, moral accountability and debt, practical examples and precedents, and countering common objections
Does Anyone have the Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
Srinivasan begins with Elliot Rodger, the 22‑year‑old who committed a mass killing in 2014, motivated by his resentment toward women who he believed had denied him sex, especially “hot blond sorority girls.” From Rodger and incel (involuntary celibate) ideology comes the claim: everyone has a right to sex / the right to be desired. Srinivasan uses this provocative claim as a way to explore what rights, desire, consent, and justice mean in the sexual domain. She clarifies that she is not endorsing the incel claim: i.e., she does not believe that any person has a right to compel someone else to have sex with them. But she wants to question more deeply: what shapes whom we desire, whom we think is desirable, and what social forces are involved in how sexual desire is distributed; no one has a “right to sex” in the sense of being owed sex (or desire by another), the political dimension of desire, personal preferences are not completely free or outside critique, tension between recognizing individual autonomy and and recognizing injustice, desire, status, and “fuckability,” and possibility (and challenge) of change.
Orientalism (introduction) by Edward Said
Said argues that “Orientalism” is not just a field of academic study about the Middle East and Asia — it is a Western style of thinking, writing, and ruling that constructs the “Orient” as fundamentally different, exotic, backward, and inferior to the West. This system of knowledge serves to justify colonial domination and Western superiority. Said’s Orientalism is a call to be critically aware of how knowledge is produced and whose interests it serves. It asks us to look behind the surface of cultural descriptions and question who benefits from how people and places are portrayed.; orientalism is a system of representation, orientalism as a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense), orientalism is linked to colonial power, orientalism is about binary oppositions, the west speaks for (and over) the orient.
