Van Zoonens theory for media a level

1. Van Zoonen's
Feminist Theory
BY MARIAM I Key words
Objectified – To be seen as an
object to be bought/sold aka not
a person.
patriarchal culture – in which
one tends to be dominated by
men

2. We get our ideas about
gender from discourse
Zoonen believes that we get our ideas about
gender through the media, so that means she
thinks we learn what it means to be female or
male from media products that we consume.
E.g., when we watch adverts, we see woman as
damsels in distress however with men we
repeatedly see them as heroic, and in this
advertisement, we see this woman as beautiful
and sexy and making women internalize, they
must meet the beauty standards.

3. Our ideas about
gender have to
be looked in
terms of
context
Our ideas of what it was to be masculine or
femineity in the 1950s may have been different
our ideas about what it is to be masculine/feminine
now in present time.
But in Britian we may be different to the ideas
about what it is to be feminine & masculine in a
different cultural context, for example woman in
the Middle East would be different from the
European countries the beach body advertisement
would not be accepted in middle east unlike the
Western world where it is more normalized

4. The objectification of
women
In these three advertisement all the woman are
being sexualised and objectified by their body in
the beach body advert the model is being almost
sold as the product saying you will reach her body
type if you buy their product.
In both these perfume adverts the man is being
shown as the one with power and the dominant
one whereas the woman are objectified this is
shown in Jimmy Choo perfume where we only see
the womans legs showing that her body is the
valueble thing she has about herself

5. Patriarchy
She believes that it also illustrates that we live in
a patriarchal culture, and she believes that this
objectification is often because our society is
dominated by men , and therefore if society is
dominated by men, then they may tend to be the
ones who make the media products and in turn is
mainly the reason why woman are usually
objectified unlike men who are always more
shown to be powerful.

6. Representation
She also believes that woman and men are often
represented very differently
As woman are often represented in her view as being
domestic, they’re seen as homemakers, as mothers, as
wives and as people that should be cleaning, cooking and
doing laundry and she thinks that may media products
confine woman to that domestic stereotype.
Whereas men are often more represented as individuals
and being more suited to the workplace and the place of
politics, this is the stereotype.

7. Spectacle
She believes that men and woman’s
bodies are represented in different ways
like how woman bodies are objectified
and sexualised & she believes that men
are shown as spectacles.