[Solved] These two ways of thinking about the image are reflected in two main approaches in feminist criticism: the sociological method refers to a study of people in society

Sociology and Semiology These two ways of thinking about the image are reflected in two main approaches in feminist criticism: the sociological method refers to a study of people in society; film critics here use the terminology of sex roles, e.g. Virgin, Vamp; second, the semiological method refers to a science of signs; critics here use a terminology from linguistics, discussing film as a signifying system, in which woman functions as “sign.”… Semiology, applied to film, attempts to explain how film communicates, how its meaning is produced in a manner analogous to the way a sentence in written language communicates meaning… [Ferdinand de] Saussure called the two aspects of the linguistic sign concept and sound-image, the signified and the signifier. The signifiers in the language system are phonemes which can be made up into words to represent certain objects in the world, i.e. the signified on the level of denotation … Thus, the sounds r-o-s-e make up the word rose, which is the sign for a flower that looks a certain way. But there is no inherent relationship between this sign and the flower. It is only an arbitrary connection and thus can never be questioned in terms of its fitness or suitability to anything in the sensual world … On the level of the sign (image, word), ideology works by a sliding between connotative and denotative usages of words or images. The strict definition of an expression (word, image, sign) is not always easy to distinguish from its connotative uses (i.e. the suggestive and associative levels). What passes itself off as denotative “natural” meanings may already carry a number of implicit connotations … Now, in cinema woman is … lifted onto the second level of connotation, myth: she is presented as what she represents for man, not in terms of what she actually signifies. Her discourse (her meanings as she might produce them) is suppressed in favour of a discourse structured by patriarchy in which her real signification has been replaced by connotations that serve patriarchy’s needs. For example, the sentence “A woman is undressing,” or the image of a woman undressing cannot remain at the denotative level of factual information, but immediately is raised to the level of connotations?her sexuality, her desirability, her nakedness: she is immediately objectified in such a discourse, placed in terms of how she can be used for male gratification. That is how our culture reads such sentences and images, although these meanings are presented as natural, as denotative, because the layering of cultural connotation is masked, hidden. Our task, then, in looking at Hollywood films is to unmask the images, the sign of woman, to see how the meanings that underlie the codes function. From: Kaplan, E. Anne. “Glossary”. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Routledge, 1983. pp. 14-18. please read the above essay about sociology and semiology and response to the below question. please provide detailed explanation. Reading Response

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