"Phenomena" is plural. If you're only looking at one thing, it's a phenomenon.
And no, actually, you can't look at Male Gaze as an observed phenomenon. The only repeatable, observer independent phenomena you have to actually observe are the behaviors of people who use the term. Not the claimed gaze itself. And no, I do not grant that anything a person "observes" is a phenomenon, except as a phenomenon of their experience. Which I have no access to. I don't therefore grant the phenomenon they claim to observe as objectively real -- that requires some sort of standard of proof. Repeatable, independently demonstrable proof. In casual conversation, I tend to take people's reports of their experience as truthful (or at least not disprovable), but when someone starts making claims about the way the world is, I tend to expect a bit better proof.
And what proof, what rigor, the hard sciences, and even the not so hard sciences like anthropology and sociology, are subject to that lit crit is not, is induction and the possibility of disproof. Lit crit, not unlike the Freudian theory that so many lit critters hold dear, fails the Popper test. Therefore it isn't science. And yet consistently those who adopt a lot of its concepts tend to run around applying them to things that aren't literature, and fall outside the scope that those concepts were ever intended to apply to, acting as if those concepts have the same theoretical validity as gravity, and that everyone should somehow know what they're talking about and accept the same base assumptions they have. Hell, a lot of times the crit crowd don't even seem to notice that they have assumptions. (I blame a serious lack of rigor in the teaching of Theory.) This is what I was objecting to, supra. The stunning lack of rigor and self-awareness that goes flying around the room before the lit critters and the self-styled Feminist Theory types and their various heirs do their little victory dance.
Oh boy, we beat down another Evil Over-Privileged Antifeminist. Yeah. Or not. Chalk up another failed communication.
no subject
And no, actually, you can't look at Male Gaze as an observed phenomenon. The only repeatable, observer independent phenomena you have to actually observe are the behaviors of people who use the term. Not the claimed gaze itself. And no, I do not grant that anything a person "observes" is a phenomenon, except as a phenomenon of their experience. Which I have no access to. I don't therefore grant the phenomenon they claim to observe as objectively real -- that requires some sort of standard of proof. Repeatable, independently demonstrable proof. In casual conversation, I tend to take people's reports of their experience as truthful (or at least not disprovable), but when someone starts making claims about the way the world is, I tend to expect a bit better proof.
And what proof, what rigor, the hard sciences, and even the not so hard sciences like anthropology and sociology, are subject to that lit crit is not, is induction and the possibility of disproof. Lit crit, not unlike the Freudian theory that so many lit critters hold dear, fails the Popper test. Therefore it isn't science. And yet consistently those who adopt a lot of its concepts tend to run around applying them to things that aren't literature, and fall outside the scope that those concepts were ever intended to apply to, acting as if those concepts have the same theoretical validity as gravity, and that everyone should somehow know what they're talking about and accept the same base assumptions they have. Hell, a lot of times the crit crowd don't even seem to notice that they have assumptions. (I blame a serious lack of rigor in the teaching of Theory.) This is what I was objecting to, supra. The stunning lack of rigor and self-awareness that goes flying around the room before the lit critters and the self-styled Feminist Theory types and their various heirs do their little victory dance.
Oh boy, we beat down another Evil Over-Privileged Antifeminist. Yeah. Or not. Chalk up another failed communication.
[Edited to close a stray italic code]