A2 feminism and the media 2021

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Feminist perspectives & the
Media
Critical Perspectives - Feminism

Feminist perspectives & the Media

Aims/objectives
• Understand relevance to media studies
• Understand key feminist concepts and terms
• Apply some feminist perspectives to set texts

What is Feminism?
On a post it note, write down 2 words you associate with
this term?

What is Feminism?
On a post it note, write down 2 words you associate with
this term?
A2 Media Studies
Critical Perspectives -
Feminism

Feminism is concerned with the ‘analysis
of the social/historical position of women
as subordinated, oppressed or exploited
either within dominant modes of
production [such as capitalism] and/or
the social relations of patriarchy or male
domination’.
MS3 Research Investigation:

Why study it for media?
You will ALL need to understand these concepts to apply them to your A2
exam case studies.
However, it does not only apply to looking at the representation of women in
the media.
For example:
• If you are looking at a particular genre or the narrative in a music video,
you might consider how it chooses to represent women
differently/similarly to men?
• If women are not present, why? Does the text contain any information
about male attitudes to women?
• If you are looking at another area of representation (age, issues,
national identity) are there gender related patterns that could relate to
these ideas?

In media and cultural studies, the central drive of feminist
perspectives is analysing how representations of women are
constructed in the media: what messages and values
(ideologies) are created, how, why and what their effect is?
Feminist film theories attempt to show how this view of women
is reflected and consolidated by the way they are represented in
film and to try and consider the effects of this on male and
female spectators.

The Patriarchy
 Male dominated society
 Most powerful roles in society are occupied by
men: politicians, business owners, media
producers, etc
 Therefore male perspectives dominate public
discourse
 In other words, the views of men are given most
prominence in discussion and representation of
gender, especially women

51% of population are women
 Women are disproportionately (under)represented
in Hollywood, both on camera and in the workforce
“behind camera”
 In 2018, New York Film Academy produced a
content analysis of gender representation in recent
Hollywood films
https://www.nyfa.edu/img/nyfa-news/headlines/women-in-film-2018.png

https://www.nyfa.edu/img/nyfa-news/headlines/women-in-film-2018.png

In UK, 51% of population are women, but
 Only 22.5% of MPs are women (2020)
 25% Newspaper reporters (2020)
 https://womeninjournalism.co.uk/

Origins: First Wave Feminism

Origins: First Wave Feminism
• Started in the early1900s
• Concerned with creating equality between men and
women.
• Based upon A Vindication of the Rights of Women by
Mary Wollstonecraft, which was written in 1792.
• Focused on legal inequalities such as voting rights and
property ownership
• Brought to public attention through the suffragette
movement.

Origins: Second Wave Feminism

Origins: Second Wave Feminism
Started in the 1960s.
Women now had equal voting rights
Feminists were interested in ensuring equality elsewhere
in women’s lives, such as the workplace and family.
Some second wave feminists were concerned with the
impact of pornography on women since the mass media
was becoming a bigger part of people’s lives.
Associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Origins: Third Wave Feminism
Began in the 1980s and continues to the present day.
Laws are now supposed to ensure equality for women in the areas
the second wave feminist were concerned about.
Concerned with
• negative stereotypes of women,
• their right to control their own sexuality (including how they
dress) and reproductive issues such as abortion and the
availability of contraception.
The most recent example of third wave feminism can be seen in
the SlutWalk movement.

Types of
feminism
Marxist feminism takes a Marxist approach to
the study of women and women’s interests, and
emphasises the way in which women are doubly
exploited – both as workers and as women
Radical feminism tends to focus on the
problem of patriarchy – the system where
men dominate in every way in society such
as the family, the workplace and politics.
For radical feminists, the main focus is on
the problem of men and male-dominated
society
Liberal feminism wants to
ensure that women have
equal opportunities with
men, through steps like
changing to law to stop
sex discrimination,
removing obstacles to
women’s full participation
in society, and better
childcare measures to
allow women to be fully
involved in work.
Black Feminism is
primarily concerned with
black and Asian
women’s experiences of
oppression and
exploitation. It combines
ideas about capitalism,
patriarchy and anti-
racism.
Post modern feminism is
associated with third wave
feminists. It acknowledges the
diversity amongst women and
encourages individual women to
find feminist ideas that combine with
their own experiences of life to
create a brand of feminism suitable
for them.

Early feminist ideas
•Early perspectives suggested that representations of women polarised around two
stereotypes reflecting central cultural values.
•Madonna (as in Mary, the mother of Jesus - not the popstar): saintly, asexual, virgin,
maternal, pure.
•Whore: highly sexual (– sex but not love) dirty, prostitute,
This has roots in Freud’s theory “the Madonna/whore complex”.
It is now seen as reductive by many critics.

Key feminist ideas
Other perspectives include a study of the representation of women in
specific genres: the way in which women are most often passive in the
narrative with the male characters having most narrative agency.
Stereotypes of women?
Are they “passive” or “active”?
Where women are proactive (film noir being an example) it is usually in
a negative way (femme fatale) and ends in control and punishment.
Horror films may sometimes be read in this way.

What is ‘The Gaze’?
•A highly influential idea, particularly in feminist film
theory.
•It describes how the viewer gazes upon (views) the
people presented and represented.
•The term ‘The Male Gaze’ was popularised by
Laura Mulvey.

Who is Laura Mulvey?
 A Professor of Media and Film at University of
London.
 A successful screenwriter, producer and director,
 She has written and edited many books and
articles on contemporary film and feminist theory
and practice.
 Her most famous work to date is her seminal essay
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ published
1975
 It has since been highly influential in film criticism.

Who is Laura Mulvey?
 The theory assesses the representation of gender
and the relationship between the text and the
audience from a feminist perspective.
 It is based in a lot of the psychoanalysis work of
individuals such as Sigmund Freud

The Male Gaze
Dominant cinema’s codes and conventions construct specific ways for women to be
looked at.
Put simply, the typical audience member is assumed to be male.
- or “The Camera is Male”
The typical audience member becomes aligned with the film’s male protagonist, by
identification, admiration or aspiration.
Hollywood cinema organises the spectator into the male position so that the spectator
has little choice but to identify with the male protagonist and become complicit with his
objectification of female characters.
Female spectators can either identify with the passive female role, or more often take
the male view.
In films, men look and women are looked at.
Women in film are simply objects for ‘the gaze’ of the protagonist/male audience.

The Male Gaze
Examples:
Megan Fox in Transformers (car breakdown scene)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0V8hDBEVPU
Constructed by The Gaze
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GsRK43Td0U
Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher (Car Wash scene)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYhaRcfCEkI
The Bond Gaze
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfL09c4cw2I

Criticisms of The Male Gaze
Mulvey’s work was based on her own conceptual analysis, rather than
empirical research.
Her work looked at the traditional mainstream films of Hollywood from
1920s-1960s.
Despite being hugely influential, the idea also has many critics. What
problems can you see with the theory?
Critics say it means that female viewers cannot derive any pleasure from
watching Hollywood films.
But critics claim that women can and do enjoy watching films from a male
perspective and Mulvey does not take into account the complex variety of
ways in which audiences consume and enjoy films.

Other types of ‘Gaze’
Progress has been made since Mulvey’s work in the 1960s and we now
see a much more diverse range of gender representations in the media.
As women have gained more political, social and economic status, media
producers have identified them as a valuable market too, leading to the
development of what some call ‘the female gaze’
Diet Coke Advert: The gardener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuHV4gwSXn4
Others have gone further to identify a ‘queer gaze’ in some media forms.
In his documentary/video essay film Dreamworlds, Sut Jhally describes the
‘Pornographic Gaze’ in music videos, as music videos increasingly take
influence from pornography in the way that they film and represent women
and sexuality.

Further feminist readings of the media
In Killing Us Softly Jean Kilbourne discusses how advertising sells not just
products but also the belief that the most important thing about women is
their appearance. We are shown unattainable images of flawlessness that
are presented as the ‘normal’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk&t=
213s

Objectification
A key theme is the representation of women in the media is objectification,
where women are constructed as ‘objects’.
This may be as passive objects with no agency of their own. For instance
as damsels in distress who need rescuing by men and who are ‘won’ as a
prize or trophy at the end of a narrative.
Or as sexual objects of desire, to be ‘used’ by men and whose only
purpose is to serve the interests of men.
One way this may occur is through dismemberment, where the cameras
focuses on only one part of the body, dismembering the woman’s body from
their head and therefore their identity and autonomy.

Naomi Wolf goes further in her book ‘The
Beauty Myth’ stating that the notion of
beauty is an entirely patriarchal, social
construction. In other words, men in any
given culture set rules about what is
considered beautiful and acceptable.
We can tell that these are constructed
because they vary between different cultures
and different times.
She notes that the more social and legal
equality women have gained, the more they
appear to be oppressed in other ways,
especially body image.

“The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more
strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon
us. During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile,
eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-
growing specialty. More women have more money and power and scope and legal
recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about
ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated
grandmothers.”
The Beauty Myth (Introduction), Naomi Wolf.

Music Videos, and in particular Hip Hop Music videos have long been a
source of debate for their contentious representation of women. Women
are often objectified, scantily clad and referred to in derogatory terms
such as ‘hoes’ and ‘bitches’.
In one particularly controversial
video for Nelly’s Tip Drill, the
rapper swipes a credit card
between a bikini wearing dancer’s
buttocks.
This kind of objectification in the
media is believed by some critics
to lead to increased mistreatment
and violence against women.

But it is not just male artists’ representation of women that is under
scrutiny.
Beyonce’s Runs the World (girls)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U&ob=av2e
versus
Nineteenpercent’s Who runs the world (lies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p72UqyVPj54

Joan Morgan refers to herself as a ‘hip-hop
feminist’ and examines the complexities of
feminism for women who have grown up with
hip hop.
She examines the perceived hypocrisies in
being a feminist woman who supports likes
hip-hop - which she argues has many male-
centric elements.
She explores the dynamic of ascribing to
feminism while simultaneously enjoying
some aspects of patriarchal culture, focusing
on how one balances and reconciles these
seemingly conflicting ideas.

Joan Morgan believes that feminists should not be spending time
analysing lyrics and finding sexism within them because that has been done
too many times before and everyone knows it is there.
She believes feminists should be less concerned with what male hip-hop
artists are saying about women and focus on female artists working within
the music industry.
She believes it is more important for feminists to focus on ‘respectability
politics’ by which she means the ways that women, especially black
women, are kept from freely expressing their sexuality by notions of what is
decent and respectable.

Liesbet van Zoonen
 gender is constructed through discourse, and that its meaning
varies according to cultural and historical context
 the display of women’s bodies as objects to be looked at is a
core element of western patriarchal culture
in mainstream culture the visual and narrative codes that are used
to construct the male body as spectacle differ from those used to
objectify the female body.

Liesbet van Zoonen
“[There is] a depressing stability in the articulation of
women’s politics and communication…
The underlying frame of reference is that women
belong to the family and domestic life and men to the
social world of politics and work; that femininity is
about care, nurturance and compassion, and that
masculinity is about efficiency, rationality and
individuality.”

bell hooks
 feminism is a struggle to end sexist/ patriarchal
oppression and the ideology of domination
 feminism is a political commitment rather than a
lifestyle choice
 race and class as well as sex determine the
extent to which individuals are exploited,
discriminated against or oppressed.

Judith Butler & Gender Performativity
 identity is performatively constructed by the very
‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (it is
manufactured through a set of acts)
 there is no gender identity behind the expressions
of gender
 performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition
and a ritual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc

Judith Butler & Gender Performativity
 identity is performatively constructed by the very
‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (it is manufactured
through a set of acts)
 there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender
 performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a
ritual.
A2 Media Studies
How can Butler’s ideas be applied to the set texts
from last year?
Consider: Tide/Wateraid/Formation/Vogue/Humans

The Bechdel Test
 A way of assessing a female character's "narrative agency"
 Started as an ironic joke/social comment in a 1985 comic by Alison
Bechdel - has since become widely used metric because of its
simplicity.

The Bechdel Test
For a film or TV show to pass the Bechdel Test, it need to meet 3 criteria:
 Have at least two named female characters
 The 2 female characters should talk to each other
 They must talk to each other about something other than a man.
A surprising number of major Hollywood films do not pass these
simple requirements.
And the original Star Wars trilogy, entire Lord of The Rings trilogy, All Harry Potter films except
Deathly Hallows pt 1

The Bechdel Test
The test is reductive and doesn't guarantee a positive representation of
women.
Likewise, failure to pass the test does not mean a film can't be a positive
representation or a 'good' film.
But looking across multiple films for the 'bigger picture' it does reveal a pattern
of underrepresentation in the media.
Greater awareness in recent years has led to improvement, as seen on the
website http://bechdeltest.com/
Look up your favourite
film – does it pass?

• Response to Backlash against 60s & 70s fem.
• Recognition of diversity of women black, post-colonial perspectives
• Rejection of dogma (including feminist dogma)
• Gender – less rigid, more fluid; idea that traditional notion of gender is
constructed and imposed by social cultural context
• Empowerment & celebration of femininity
• Women can wield sexual power
• Men have lost essential aspects of masculinity and have become more
vulnerable
• Fuelled by advances in abortion, employment and fertility laws
• Moderation of discourse on oppression
• Traditional feminism perpetuates the idea of women as victims, post-
feminism concentrates on ideas of empowerment and liberation
• Emphasis on choices and freedom of choice
Post feminism/Post Modern Feminism

HeforShe
Emma Watson Speech UN 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Dg226G2Z8
Campaign Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZptgM-jhZo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFHU32WuDzk

Representation of Women in The Media – Case Studies
Music Videos
Music videos have come under fire for their overly sexualised,
representation of women
Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (2013) (cleaner
version)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU
Exemplifies ‘Male Gaze’ as male performers look upon and desire
women who are scantily dressed, grabbed forcefully and ‘objectified’ –
wrapped in plastic and even turned into a table.
The uncensored version even more female nudity. The males are more
modestly dressed and have all of the narrative authority through the
vocals.

The song and video caused a lot of offense and controversy at the
time because of the video and the ‘rapey’ no-means-yes lyrics. The
song was labeled sexist and accused of promoting non-consensual
sex. It got banned at 20 university student unions.
Thicke defended the video saying that it actually had a feminist
meaning with the lyrics ‘that man is not your maker’.

The video was directed by a female, Diane Martel who said
“I want to make videos that sell records…not to make videos that
express my own obsessions, but to make videos that move units…
I wanted to deal with the misogynist, funny lyrics in a way where the
girls were going to overpower the men. Look at Emily Ratajkowski’s
performance; it’s very, very funny and subtly ridiculing. That’s what is
fresh to me. It also forces the men to feel playful and not at all like
predators.
I directed the girls to look into the camera, this is very intentional and
they do it most of the time; they are in the power position.
I don’t think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous, the guys are
silly as fuck. That said, I respect women who are watching out for
negative images in pop culture and who find the nudity offensive, but I
find [the video] meta and playful.”

Some people have even said that the ‘hysterical furor’ in response to
the video is in fact ‘racist’.
Women are regularly represented like this in Hip Hop videos, with Black
male artists. It is common place yet relatively little is done about it.
Equally, the ‘honeys in the video are usually black too.
In Thicke’s video, he and the girls are white, doing stuff similar to their
black counterparts, but people are outraged. This, it is said, reflects a
double standard towards sexism that says that it is somehow accepted
that black culture do this but somehow white artists should have higher
standards.

Lily Allen: Hard Out Here (2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CazRHB0so
Lily Allen’s song and video take a satirical swipe at the way that women
are represented in music videos and the expectations placed upon them.
The video makes several direct references to Thicke’s video with lyrics
about ‘tearing your butt in two’ and the balloon letters at the end.
The video ironically reinforces many of the conventional, stereotypical
and ‘sexist’ representations of women in the video, but in an extremely
exaggerated, and comical way. As satire, the idea is to draw attention to,
ridicule, undermine the issue.

Lily Allen: Hard Out Here (2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CazRHB0so
However some have noted that by still included these representations of
bikini clad, booty shaking females, the video is still taking advantage of
the ‘sex sells’ message. It is effectively having its cake and eating it.
Other have also called this video racist with ‘a white middle-class woman
playing ringleader to anonymous black women’.
So is this video truly challenging dominant ideologies, or simply
reinforcing them?
A less ambiguous, feminist satire of Blurred lines was made by the
Auckland Law Revue Girls
Feminist Spoof ‘Defined Lines’ (2013)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC1XtnLRLPM

Mulvey: The (Male) Gaze
Jean Kilbourne: Adverts:
flawless, unattainable images
presented as ‘normal’
Naomi Wolf: The Beauty Myth
Van Zoonen: Women and men
represented differently
Women = domestic caring,
nurturing, bodiy as object
Men = efficiency, individuality,
rationality, body as spectacle
bell hooks: Gender, race and
class, diversity, Intersectionality
Judith Butler: Queer theory,
gender fluidity Gender
performativity
Apply ideas to Y1 texts

Mulvey: The (Male) Gaze
Jean Kilbourne: Adverts: flawless,
unattainable images presented as
‘normal’
Naomi Wolf: The Beauty Myth
Van Zoonen: Women and men
represented differently
Women = domestic caring,
nurturing, bodiy as object
Men = efficiency, individuality,
rationality, body as spectacle
bell hooks: Gender, race and
class, diversity, Intersectionality
Judith Butler: Queer theory,
gender fluidity Gender
performativity
Apply ideas to Y1 texts

A2 feminism and the media 2021

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