世界以痛吻我，我却报之以歌

How gender politics evacuates in This is going to hurt

------By Adam kay.

BBC series This is going to hurt adapted by the same name book written by formal gynae senior doctor Adam kay captured every audience member’s empathy as soon as it was released.

Here are some issues we may draw attention in terms of racial and sexism content (racism patient refuse to accept Pakistani doctor and black midwife) of modern British society, domestic violence, and the homophobic content. Among those crucially provocative issues, my point of interest focuses on the discourses of male entitlement including Toxic Masculinity and male empowerment and the female representation of pregnancy stigma.

Introduction:

In traditional media representation, Males are more likely to be portrayed as aggressive, argumentative, and competitive. Females are more likely to be described as affectionate, emotionally expressive, passive, and tender. The old binary opposition which put femininity at one end of the political spectrum and feminism at the other is no longer an accurate way of conceptualizing female experience. Gender segregation now by itself becomes a power mechanism.

Representation of male privilege within the ‘female’ spaces.

Center stage problem, center stealing and Overconfidence:

In the first episode of this is going to hurt, by saying “I am the most senior doctor here. I am running this ward now and it’s up to me.” Adam attempts to entitle and empower his social identity. This action gets denied immediately by the black midwife leader Tracy by saying “I am running this ward, young man. I am more than capable, and I am handing myself.” The power dynamic is being shifted abruptly and making Adam look small in his position by the next sequence of reverse shots which kind of foreshadows the MacGuffin for Adam in the next chapter (who is the complainer about him to GMC).

Psychological or personal entitlement refers to one’s sense of deservingness. Entitlement reflects the belief that a person deserves a set of outcomes because of who they have done. Men give higher estimates of their ability than do women, and men’s self-estimates tend to be independent of their actual ability. On cognitive tests, for instance, men give themselves higher ratings than their actual performance merits, whereas women tend to have a more realistic appraisal of their own performance.

When those who are used to being at the center of everything important in society are moved from the center, however briefly, group members experience a threat and therefore are motivated to re-assert their privilege which feels natural, comfortable, and the natural order of things. Members of dominants groups assume that their perceptions are the pertinent ones, that their problems are the ones that need to be addressed, and that in discourse they should be the speaker rather than the listener.

Male entitlement: hegemonic masculinity, perceptions of male marginalization and Sanction authority of the white male doctors.

Hegemonic masculinity extensively critiqued the male sex role literature and proposed a model of multiple masculinities and power relations. In turn, this model was integrated into a systematic sociological theory of gender. The defense of hegemonic masculinity is usually done quietly through institutions. For example, when Adam’s best friend Greg introduces a bunch of guys to a female strip club as his own bachelor party, by enforcing all the male members of the group into a solid clan in which all the discrimination towards women is generally acceptable, they enhance their hegemonic masculinity mechanism.

On overt masculinity politics emerges that exalts men’s power and opposes feminism and by obeying all the criteria and principals within the convention of hegemonic masculinity, anything opposite that is impossibly inclusive such as homosexuality.

For Judith Butler, nonetheless, Gender and sex were nothing more than cultural constructions.

So, in episode two of This is going to hurt, when Adam and his partner Henry finish the dinner with the couple Greg and his fiancée, by saying “Greg’s life seems settled and normal.” Adam refuses to accept his own feeling of belongingness by admitting Greg’s heterosexual normativity and denying his own sexual performativity. Heteronormativity is the idea that heterosexual attraction and relationships are the normal form of sexuality. It is rooted in a linked essential, dichotomous understanding of sexuality and gender and the perception that these things are fixed and unchanging. The construction of gender identities is produced through repetitive performance of behaviors, physical stylistic expressions, without which the binary distinction has no sense. The instability of the relationship between sex and gender attest to the performative nature of identity. By denying the homosexual identity and relationships with community, it defines the heterosexuality as natural and the norm. It enacts the heterogeneity of drives through the proliferation and destruction of univocal signification. This could be regarded as the primitive origin of homophobic performativity which is unforgivably toxic.

Meanwhile, by denying men’s approach to vulnerability, the dichotomous binary mechanism is constructed by itself. When in episode three Adam’s partner Henry asks about his situation by saying “I know something is up for you”, he shows his concern and sentimentality towards Adam but at the same time, Adam refuses to tell Henry about the medical negligence. When Henry says, “let me in, let me know what is going on in there”, the director uses a lot of over the shoulder shots of Henry over Adam and Adam’s singular medium close-up shots in the continuity editing to illustrate Adam’s interior emotional turbulence. Here, again as audience we can perceive that Adam is going through a tremendously traumatized internal journey without letting Henry be aware of it. When Adam says to his eight-five-year-old polish patient Mrs. Winnicka, ‘I used to reckon I was good at medicine but bad at other stuff. Not great either right now’, he finally acknowledges his vulnerability and weakness by admitting that it is inappropriate using his medical knowledge as a mechanism of generating power entitlement in public medical sphere.

Afterwards, when the consultant of the hospital Mr. Lockhart warns Adam by saying ‘shits happen, you can’t let yourself fell it all.’ Which becomes the last front line that block Adam to break down. In this way, toxic masculinity principals are transmitted among generations by denying the plausibility of showing men’s sensibility and sentimentality. The death of Mrs. Winnicka in some level serves as a dramatic impulse and plot motivation to imply Adam’s collapsing point in the next chapter.

The whole narrative does not approach sexual masculinity issue by telling the storyline itself, but this is still deserved to be regarded as Toxic Masculinity related issue because by enhancing that masculinity is strong, tough, and natural while femininity is weak, vulnerable, and artificial, it proliferates the conception of binary construction even among people who believe that women and men are equals. So, the people understand masculinity as the drive for power, domination, and control. If any social representation and public behavior demonstrate that it is acceptable for men to be fragile, it breaks down the whole dichotomous structure where masculinity is an experience to entitle power and female body is naturally entitled with the responsibility to give birth. The process of moral regulation through discourse makes ontological and epistemological promises of a particular and historical form of social order natural. In this process of resonating binary structure, discourse of ideal pregnancy must be understood as situated moral constructs, which regulate women’s maternal experiences, expressions, and responsibilities. Our collective fear of dangers has forced us into a position where we have created a theory from the body of damage done to us in terms of masochism but expediency.

Particularization and negotiation:

By representing the voices of women and ethnic others as normal, they become possible objects of identification for men.

Particularizing may also be carried out by representing what men do as being particular and only representing a certain social group of men, that is denying them the right to represent the universal any more than women do.

In the episode six, when Doctor Shruti meets up with her subordinate junior locum doctor—a tall young white guy who seems very boyish and innocently naïve, the cinematographer opens with a medium profile shot by moving the camera around to the side and subsequently reversing the over-the shoulder shot towards the young man functioning as emphasizing how small the young white apprentice is and empowering Doctor Shruti. Intriguingly, in the next sequence, when the junior doctor stands up and looks down Shruti by saying to Shruti ‘are you one of the midwives, love?’ and Shruti replies by saying ‘I am actually your boss, love.’ We see how the whole power dynamic is solidly constructed. And in the next theater operation scene, the apprentice directly faints during surgery because of witnessing huge amount of blood. While Shruti calmly completes the mission with her intellectual background and wisdom. From here, we notice that the relationship shot in any power dynamic constructing scenario is ought to be established on the figure situated in a weaker position so the power dynamic can be shifted by the reverse shots. If we compare this scenario with the former scenario where Shruti was subordinated towards Adam, we can reach on an undeniable conclude that gender is nothing more than a social construction.

Judith Butler defines gender as the consequence of reiterated acts or practices, even if there is a contradiction or instability between their biological sex and their gendered actions. Through gender performativity, one may cause themselves to shape their desire. Gender is performative which means we are not acting it like in a performance but rather constructing it. In the episode four of This is going to hurt, when being asked about his fiancée by his subordinate college Shruti, Adam corrects her spelling as a male version fiancé by saying ‘My alpha male demeanor clearly threw you off the scent ’which is kind of an ironic sarcasm for stereotypes towards queer male intellectuals in social sphere.

As For Foucault, an ethical sensibility is a process of constant experimentation and reappraisal, in which new experiences are integrated, and reflection helps determine future actions.

From this perspective, if any newly liberal social order is trying to be reached out, we must aspire to building processes of socialization of the new generations within a framework of gender sensitivity where the culture of peace prevails over violence without discrimination, establishing relations of equality and justice, not only in the rights recognized by states among their citizens, but also in daily life, in schools, workplaces and within governments.

How those female representations subordinated to Adam are used to consolidate his power in privilege.

Firstly: Racial issue:

In the first episode of This is going to hurt, the Woman in labor is more comfortable with a Cis gendered white man delivering their baby instead of a black midwife which is particularly bizarre. Again here, black women are unempowered by others. This phenomenon is repeated in the next theater scenario when the white woman in caesarean is unwilling to let the Pakistan origin doctor Shruti to hold her newborn baby. It’s quite intriguing that even though the racial discrimination is clear, the racist herself refuses to admit the offensive fact. However fortunately, the establishing process of the characteristics of the character black midwife leader Tracy is being achieved by performative narrative.

When consultant of the hospital Mr. Lockhart asks her why not put the alarm sector issue at the list, she answers him by saying “would you like me to take off the list to make time?” which is a very directly confronting way and reveals that she might be the real ‘assassin’ to kill Adam’s obsessive delusion.

The second part: empower shifted.

In the episode four when Adam faces in front of his senior consultant obstetrician Mrs. Houghton, he is asked to buy coffee for the team crew which was exactly what he urged his junior subordinate Shruti to do in the last chapter.

By saying ‘why don’t you get around coffees in.’ Doctor Houghton empowers herself and underpowers Adam. In the next sequence, by saying ‘I wonder if you might allow me to perhaps do the caesarean.’ Adam puts himself in a weakening position of this power dynamic shifting relationship. Actor Ben Whishaw dissimulates Adam’s penance and awkwardness by a series of body gestures which is a real verisimilitude spectacular for the viewers.

The formulaic onscreen depictions are limited along gender and racial lines emasculate the universal female experience of adulthood tragically. This demonstrates their success and respectability within the white dominated literary space.

If we compare Shruti, Tracy and Doctor Houghton’s identity, we can see more clearly the distinction between their different representations.

Embodiment and representation of Womanhood pregnancy stigma.

The issue crucially being concerned about This is going to hurt is the women in labor. How they look life, how they feel and why this show is so cruel to our audiences. And, how those female patients around Doctor Adam enhance their feminized statement. Part of the complexity of misogyny is that women can be punished for stepping outside bounds of femininity, and for residing within those boundaries.

In the episode five of This is going to hurt, when doctor shruti tells this middle-aged couple about the implausibility of being parents by saying ‘you only got one percent change to be successfully pregnant.’ We can see the agony and disappointment expressed by the wife’s face not by the husband.

And, when we see the frame and composition of this reverse shot, the camera attempts to focus on captivating the woman’s facial expression. All the narrative in this dramatic space emphasizes how suffocating and struggling it is for women to accept the impossibility of being pregnant.

The woman’s body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradictions: a space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability, a numinous figure, and the incarnation of evil, a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture. The pregnant woman is not identified as a sole entity, but as one figure in the interrelation between mother and child. The pregnant woman is subordinated to the interests of her unborn child.

Women are simultaneously assigned to a passive role, as recipients of care and containers for their infants. Also in the episode five, when Doctor Adam operates a surgery for this nineteen-year-old girl to fix her vulva self-damage. It shows us the destructiveness and cruelty the performative normality and social constrictions have done to a young girl.

Pregnancy is simultaneously one of the most embodied of human experiences and one of the most discursively regulated. The disciplinary power of discourse lies in producing types of knowledges and making specific kinds of subjectivities socially viable.

The mother child dynamic is set up as the ultimate paradigm of the natural caring relationship, and therefore as the ultimate paradigm of all social relations. The mother child dyad is not seen as a particular social and cultural construct, nor is any consideration given to the fact that an ethics of caring may not be an appropriate approach to all forms of social interaction.

Possibility of womanhood as a complex and idealized conjunction of a multiplicity of female identities: sexual, domestic, and so on, as a palliative for the narrative’s frequent focus on the question of women’s incompatible social roles.

The narrative mode in This is going to hurt by only showing pregnant women condition in public sphere offers an idealized vision of family life and working motherhood. Through its blurring of the boundaries between home vibe and public vibe, it undermines patriarchal capitalism, a system which insists on keeping separate, gendered, and differently valued the two independent atmospheres.

The distinction and conflict between public and private and feminist and feminine identities is irrevocably integrated. For example, when Shruti found out domestic violence track of a female pregnant patient from her bruises in arms and shoulders, she immediately took action to rescue the situation. However, when the dramatic complicity is reached out on climax, the midwife Tracy tells Shruti that we still are uncapable to do anything when the patient suffering from domestic violence confronts the same situation in her own house in the future. From here, we are aware that social resources are limited when intervening family issue.

How can we change the traditional male approach to international politics by the re-traditionalization of gender.

Paternalistic patriarchy.

In the early capitalist regions of England and elsewhere, the putting out system, where urban capitalists employed rural households for parts of the production process, led to a strengthening of an archaized version of male household power, which in turn, paradoxically, turned women into a main production force in the early industrial revolution. The putting-out system was formal factorization, while industry make it a reality- outside the home, for the first time outside the reach of reproduction activity logic and rationale. The fact that the paternalistic framework differed from the male/female, production/reproduction-like spontaneous ideas of gender in our time has been underscored of intimacy and the body survived long into the modern age.

The Paternalistic stereotypes contribute to justifying and maintaining a social system of gender inequality. There are gender stereotypes not merely descriptive but prescriptive, expressing expectations about how women ought to be. It assumes that women are weak, fragile, and incompetent, women who are subjected to benevolent sexism view themselves as less competent; such women are viewed by others as less competent; moreover, women who reject benevolent sexism are viewed as ungracious and cold. Attributions of non-traditional women’s supposed lack of warmth further serve to rationalize acts of discrimination.

In political terms, paternalistic patriarchy was dismantled by democratic movements mainly among men, including the bourgeois revolutions that symbolically and sometimes literally cut off the heads of the old order. It is misleading to say that masculinity became more democratic, since what was involved was the fabrication or factorization of a new sense of identity. Equating difference with inequality provides men with an instrument to use violence against women when other forms of control no longer suffice.

Collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange are key factors in terms of inclusiveness. In Foucault’s work, the idea of technologies of the self is part of an attempt to formulate a view of subjectivity that explains how individuals must draw on available discourses, and yet can act autonomously. Judith Butler is concerned with the production of subjectivity within the processes performatively through the repetition of given signs and norms. According to Foucault, agency should be located within the possibility of a variation on the repetition of norms and conceptualized in terms of a taking up of tools where the very taking up is enabled by the tools lying there.

From this perspective, agency can be seen as self-reflexive adoption of a specific discourse, and we can extend this to kinds of acts which sartorial choices and uses of media technologies might indicate.

Conclusion: Agency in post feminism:

Post feminism is a set of ideologies, strategies, and practice that marshal liberal feminist discourses such as freedom, choice, and independence, and incorporate them into a wide array of media, merchandising, and consumer participation whose dynamic is a paradoxical double movement where the dissemination of discourses about freedom and equality functions as a hegemonic strategy to dilute those very politics, providing the context for the retrenchment of gender and gendered relations.

The post in post feminism represents not only a temporality, or a backlash against feminism, but also a sensibility; core features of post feminism included an emphasis on individualism, choice, and agency, a resistance to interrogating structural gendered inequalities, and a renewed focus on a woman’s body as a site of liberation. Post feminism responds to a history of feminisms that have directly challenged media representations of women and the commodification of gender, and have focused on social realms including legal discourse, politics, and education. This post feminism sensibility authorized the individualism of women more than anything else, celebrating a kind of gendered freedom from both patriarchy and feminism, whereby women are apparently free to become all they want to be.

Indeed, post feminism is enabled by a neoliberal capitalist context, where values such as entrepreneurialism, individualism, and the expansion of capitalist markets are embraced and adopted by women to craft their selves.

Ultimately, abdication by feminist theory from the task of proposing a critical perspective on the authenticity of our felt needs and demands means that it necessarily remains locked into a legitimation of present social relations as offering the most appropriate management of needs spawned by it.

Television has been historically and pejoratively constructed as a feminine medium. It is useful to contextualize such journalistic accounts of the perceived female takeover of television and discourses of the feminization of television with reference to the narratives of female success, empowerment and mobility that were circulating in the wider culture.

Attendant process of detraditionalization and individualization have particularly destabilizing effects on key abstract collective categories and forms of modernity such as class, gender, identity. However, such postfeminist narratives and signs of female choice and empowerment, held up as marking the successes of feminism, betray the extent to which they simultaneously mark its incorporation, revision and depoliticization.

Gendered hierarchies are reinstated through new subtle forms of resurgent patriarchal power. The characteristics associated with the feminine, including: the predominance of surface, simulation, and masquerade; the authority of the consumer; and a dedifferentiation of the social, involving a domestication of the public sphere, are understood to be the dominant aesthetics and practices of consumer culture.

Gendered metaphors of television are also classifying metaphors in which the female viewer is once more constructed as the possessor the naïve gaze of mass consumerist culture against which the knowing gaze of the middle-class critic is constructed.

Even though shifts are taking place regarding gender in contemporary culture, there is a need to be cautious of overstating the gains and freedoms open to women in the reflexive, post-traditional and post-feminist context of late modernity. There process fosters a reconfiguration of these central categories such as class, gender, and sexuality. This reconfiguring process is illustrated precisely by the reflection upon women’s liberation from the rules and norms of traditional gendered discourses wherein liberal feminist values should have been felt to become a common sense across culture landscape.

References:

----Male roles, masculinities, and violence: a culture of peace perspective

Breines, Ingeborg; Connell, Raewyn; Eide, Ingrid; UNESCO; Expert Group Meeting on Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace.

----This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor. Adam Kay.

----Men who hate women: from Incels to pick up artists: the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all. –LAURA BATES.

----EVERYDAY SEXISM—LAURA BATES.

----Modern misogyny. Anti-feminism in a post-feminist era. Kristin j. Anderson.

----New femininities: post feminism, neoliberalism, and subjectivity. Edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff.

----Foucault and Feminism. --Lois Mcnay.

----Interrogating post feminism: gender and politics of popular culture, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, editors.

----The history of sexuality volume 4: confessions of the flesh. –Michel Foucault.

----Dude, you are a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school. –Pascoe, C.J. University of California Press.