●
Lecture 8- constructing gender
○
Ideal representations of masculinity and femininity
■
Duke is standing upward and stearn, looks like he is entering your space,
authority
■
In your face item he is wearing and emphasizing authority
■
She is sitting and her body is essentially hided by the fabric of what she is
wearing
■
Constrained in a domestic setting, small dog and a clock on the table to remind us
of patients
○
Patriarchy and domesticity
■
Renaissance women's primary virtue were chastity and motherhood, her domain
was the private world of the home
○
Medicine and the 4 humors
■
Women's subordinate role in renaissance culture was also tied to medical
understanding of the human body
■
Most influential was ancient theory of four humors
●
Blood , phlegm, yellow bile and black bile
■
Men and women were understood to be opposites
■
Men were physiologically categorized ny superior humor and were associated
with heat and dryness and woman were inferior humors associated with cold and
wetness
■
Cold wet would make her inconstant and accounted for timidity and explained
menstruation and pain of childbirth
○
Masculine ideal
■
"Fortune is a woman and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and
ill use her; and it is seen she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous
rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is,therefore, always
woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent,
and with more audacity to command her."—Machiavelli,The Prince
○
The gaze
■
Male gaze- often spoken in reference to male artists erotic depiction of eoman but
prevalance of the male toward male subject during renaissance has often been
erased
■
Male same sex love as exalted
