Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or ‘You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr Jones?  

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"[...] 'You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You Mr. Jones?'" first appeared in 1973 in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib. In it, Laura Mulvey critiqued the work of British pop artist Allen Jones who had produced a series of sculptures in 1970 called Women as Furniture in which "life-size effigies of women, slave-like and sexually provocative, double as hat-stands, tables and chairs." Some of these may be familiar as they were featured in a scene in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Mulvey pointed out that Jones was simply repeating a cultural trope or set of conventions which could be seen in many forms of popular culture and mass media: fashion magazines such as Vogue, Harper's and Bazaar, news magazines such as Life, advertisements of all sorts, TV shows, and films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Barbarella. Mulvey's point was that Jones, like many male auteurs in the visual arts was speaking in the language of fetishism." --source unidentified

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"Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious; or, You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You, Mr Jones?" is a short essay by Laura Mulvey in which she critiques the work of British pop artist Allen Jones who had produced a series of sculptures in 1970 called Hatstand, Table and Chair depicting women as furniture. The essay is collected in Visual and Other Pleasures.

Abstract from SpringerLink 2019:

"To decapitate equals to castrate. The terror of the Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. The hair upon the Medusa’s head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration. (Freud, ‘The Medusa’s Head’)"





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