Women's Bodies: As "symbols Of Production And Consumption

In the long process of the development of human culture, the patriarchal system, like a ubiquitous ghost, could be sensed everywhere. In the literary texts and the cultural texts, the women's body becomes the field where men and the patriarchal society commit violence and oppression to women, and the tool that the patriarchal modes used to enslave women spiritually and maintain the gender system. The female body, as a sign, is rearranged by the patriarchal symbolic order, produced and organized by the language program and turned into the target of male consumption, that is to say, being put under the males'gaze, the subjectivity without images becomes the process of infinite protrusion and enlargement of physical organs and the factors of sex and re-produces the values needed by the patriarchal society. During this transformation, male's control over the female body has experienced the development trend from dominant to recessive, from the protrusion of desire narration in literary texts to the incorporation of desire in the enlightenment, to the commercialization, visualization and simulacrum of female body, demonstrating the historical trajectory of the patriarchal tactics of controlling. Especially in modem society, by virtue of encoding, patriarchal society interprets sex code as the re-constructed consumption model of aesthetics of sensibility, and re-interprets cultural production and consumption as commodity production and consumption. Moreover, with the help of the dissemination and inducement of the mass media and the motivation of the commercial culture, it meticulously fabricates a sex fable with modernity characteristics and internalizes the connotation of the fable as the values and life styles of the consumers. Its essence is the replay of patriarchal cultural texts in the context of consumerism. This thesis, setting the literary works in tradition era and the film and TV works in image era as examples, tries to illustrate the effects of patriarchy in these two textual codes and the characteristics of its combination with the commodity consumerism and reveals the unequal gender concepts in the production and consumption of the sex code and analyses the role and attitude of intellectuals in the process.This thesis consists of introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction "female body, sex and media's turn" makes a summary of female body by clarifying the concept of female body, pointing out the possible crisis poses by female body after linguistic turn. In the body part, five chapters, entitled respectively "female body and consumer society", "from symbol to code--modern transition of sex code", "production and consumption of sex code in tradition era", "production and consumption of sex code in image era", "textual analysis in different eras---aking certain kind of sex code in novel Taili and the movie of'Lust, Caution'for example", are elaborated. In the conclusion part, the whole content of this thesis is reviewed and summarized, the future development of female body predicted. In the chapter " female body and consumer society", the writer explores the origin and boundary of women's body from angles of genealogy and existentialism, makes a probe on the encoding situation of women's body in the consumer society. In the chapter entitled "from symbol to code---modern transition of sex code", tiie definitions of symbol and code are distinguished and then the development of female body from symbol to code in different texts is traced. Then the author analyzes the production and consumption of sex code in reading era and image era, shows the traits of sex code from explicitness to implicitness and the changes of consumers'cultural concept. The writer further points out that the relationship between texts containing sex code and the mainstream culture results in different treatments of female body as sex code in different periods, and reveals the historical circumstances of patriarchal system. Based on specific texts, the last chapter illustrates how the patriarchal system is inserted in the texts to deconstruct the subjectivity of women's body and how it is combined with consumerism to spread and reproduce the patriarchal ideology. After analyzing Taili and other works written by Zhang Ziping, readers can find out that the limited resistance of female body as sex code is caused by its deviation from the theme of enlightenment. However, in the movie "Lust, Caution" with a rise of visual consumption culture and the establishment of new aesthetics principle, the spectacle of female body is being turned off to consumption object, writers, movie makers and consumers can reach a temporary agreement on the premise of desire consumption. This combination becomes the actual earth where the patriarchy concept grows, and historical premise on which patriarchy concept is becoming ideology.The reproduction and consumption of cultural sense of sex code arc not generated automatically but completed with the participation and promotion of patriarchy desire machine. It aims at, under the dominance of patriarchal cultural model, stimulating the consumers'desire and realizing the possession and dominance of female body in concept with the help of media transition and visual consumerism. Therefore, in conclusion, the concept of "generative female body" is proposed, which is not the female body under patriarchy model or the one under feminism, but the one which seeks differences from similarities and seeks similarities from differences. Returning to the original state of experience without essential definition, "generative female body" is always generating.