Feminist Media by Muhammad Faheem

1. Muhammad Faheem
MS-1st
Mr Inam Ur Rehman

2.  Feminist perspectives on the media examine the
devaluation of women in the media
 They are interested in questions of representation
and gender
 They analyse structures of power that influence
the devaluation of women in the media
 They see the media as central to the
discrimination against women

3. First Wave
In the 1830s, the main issues were abolition of
slavery and women’s rights.
1848 – Women’s Rights Convention held in
Seneca Falls, NY.
1920 – the 19th
Amendment guaranteed women the
right to vote.

4. 1. Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s
 This is also referred to the as the second wave in the development of feminism
 This phase concentrated on ending inequality and discrimination.
 Its development was partly influenced by the publication of The Feminine Mystique.
 During this phase, women questioned their exclusion from the public sphere and the
idea that they should concentrate on the private or domestic sphere
 They sought to remove obstacles preventing their full participation in the public sphere
by demanding:
 Laws banning discrimination in the work place
 Maternal leave rights
 Child care centres
 Equal education
 Equal job training opportunities
 The right to control reproduction (birth control, abortion)

5. 2. Political Fragmentation in the women’s movement
 Differences have developed within feminism over issues
such as:
The reasons for women’s oppression
Why women accept their subordination
How this oppression should be resolved
Gender and identity
This is reflected in the different strands within feminist
perspectives on the media

6. 3. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
 Published in 1963, it’s seen as giving impetus to the second wave of the feminist movement
 According to Friedan, the feminine mystique is a modern version of the idea that ‘a woman’s
place in the home’
 In this myth:
i. Femininity = women who are mothers and housewives
ii. Lack of femininity = women who are independent career women
 She believed that the media was one of the social institutions that promoted these values
 A survey of women’s magazines found that they focused on women’s roles in the domestic
sphere
 Advertisers were interested in keeping women in the home to buy their products and they
utilised the ‘sexual sell’, in which they promised feminine fulfilment if women brought their
products

7. 4. Unequal portrayal and access to the media
i. There were few women employed in the media and very
few in positions of power and influence
ii. Women’s issues were ignored in the media
 When they were included, they tended to be trivialised
 Women were portrayed:
In the private not the public sphere
As sex objects
This resulted in what Gaye Tuchman referred to as the
‘symbolic annihilation’ of women in the media

8. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
 De Beuavoir was a French philosopher and writer
 She was an existentialist who subscribed to Jean Paul
Satre (her life partner)’s maxim that ‘existence precedes
essence’
That is, humans define their own reality
This makes them difference from entities who essential
properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are
In contrast, what makes a human being is not fixed by his
or her type but by what she or he makes of him or herself,
ie, who he or she becomes

9.  Thus in The Second Sex, de Beauvoir makes the
statement that one is not born a woman but
becomes one
 No biological or psychological circumstance
determines woman
 Instead, it’s the whole of civilisation that
produces the creature known as woman
 She believed women were socially constructed as
the Other, which accounted for their oppression

10.  Refers to those who are deviant or different
 It’s part of identity definition in humans
That is, we define ourselves in opposition to
others
That is, we think in terms of dichotomies or
binary opposites
 It’s part of the way social groups:
i. Identify those who don’t fit into society
ii. Identify those they want to exclude or
subordinate

11.  In the book, de Beauvour asks ‘what is a woman?’
 Some of the definitions that have been given include:
i. One who has a womb
 However, she argues that not everyone who has a womb is regarded as a
woman or as feminine
ii. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities...We should
regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness’ – Aristotle
iii. Woman is an ‘imperfect man...an incidental being’ – St Thomas
 Therefore, woman is defined as relative to man
 Woman is, therefore, not an autonomous being
 Man is the subject, the absolute and woman is the Other
 She argues that this definition of woman is not natural but cultural

12.  According to liberal feminists, the media:
1. Reinforce traditional sex-role stereotypes
 Women hardly appear in the media.
 When they do, they are portrayed mostly as wives, mothers, daughters,
girlfriends or sex-objects.
 According to Van Zoonen, they are usually depicted as young and beautiful
but not well educated.
 The media act as socialising agents, rewarding women for ‘appropriate
behaviour’ and punishing them for behaviour that is perceived as
inappropriate
 The media perpetuate sex role stereotypes becos:
 Gender inequalities in society
 The media reflect these inequalities and dominant social values
 The males who dominate the media were socialised into these values

13. Liberal feminists offer 2 solutions to this problem:
i. Women should enter the male-dominated media and
acquire power so that they can influence media content
and change portrayals of women
That is, women should strive for equality in the male-
dominated public sphere
In the long-run, the media will catch up and begin to
reflect these changes in its content
ii. In the meantime, the media should portray men and
women in non-traditional roles

14. 1. Seen as reformist, ie, advocates change through equal opportunities policies
2. Seen as a bourgeois perspective becos it says women should strive for equality
within capitalist structures
3. It portrays a standard image of the type of woman women and the media should
aspire to, that is, a woman who is:
 Autonomous
 Assertive
 Financially independent
 Critics say this created a new stereotype of the ‘superwoman’ who can
efficiently juggle a career, children and a husband
4. More women have entered the media but this hasn’t translated into power for
women
 Some critics believe instead this trend has resulted in declining salaries and loss
of status in places where journalism, for instance, is dominated by women.

15. 1. Mass media are owned and produced by men and
therefore operate to benefit patriarchy.
2. They therefore depict values that uphold patriarchy, eg:
The traditional family is depicted as an unchanging,
sacred social structure.
Heterosexuality and male dominance are presented as
natural.
2. Women should create their own means of communication
to resolve these problems.

16. 1. Doesn’t take into account the potential for
conflict among women
2. Their strategies inevitably condemn women to
the margins of mainstream society
4. Some feminist media have failed to attract
readers, audiences and advertisers
5. Has failed to gain much ground in media research
in its pure form but has been incorporated into
other theories

17.  Women should establish female media structures
separate from those dominated by men.
 Women should produce woman-centred texts.
 Women should produce texts that redefine
femininity and masculinity.
 Women should produce texts that celebrate the
qualities that make women different from and better
than men.
 Has faced some of the same criticism and limitations
as radical feminist perspectives.

18. 1. The media are ideological instruments presenting
the capitalist and patriarchal society as the natural
order
2. The media are used to condition women to
accept patriarchal values as natural
3. To resolve this problem:
i. Media structures should be reformed
ii. Women should produce their own media

19.  The media work with other social and cultural institutions to reflect and
reinforce dominant ideas about women and gender
 The media help to construct gender, hence the differing representations seen
in the media
 However, audiences don’t have to accept the values portrayed in the media
 The media are therefore sites of struggle
 Women should challenge not the representations in the media but the
ideologies that underlie these representations
 They should challenge the traditional frameworks used to construct media
texts, such as the binary oppositions used in the media
 These binary oppositions neglect all categories that fall between the two
accepted extremes

20. 1. The patriarchal content in media texts is stronger
than the resistance of audiences.
2. These feminists are too optimistic to give power to
audiences.
3. Ignores the political economy of the media.
4. Ignores the importance of class to the operations of
the media.

21.  Liberal, radical and socialist feminists take an instrumental approach to
the role of the media
i. The media are the main instruments responsible for conveying values
about women and femininity.
 These values are patriarchal, stereotypical and hegemonic.
 The media socialise us into accepting patriarchal gender values and
beliefs.
ii. The media serve as mechanisms of social control
 According to liberal feminists, they pass on society’s sexist heritage to
secure continuation, integration, order and the transmission of dominant
values
 According to radical feminists, mainstream media serve patriarchal
society by distorting women’s issues to prevent conflict
 According to socialist feminists, the media portray capitalism and
patriarchy in an attractive manner

22.  Liberal, radical and socialist feminists believe:
The media ignore many aspects of women’s lives,
They focus on stereotypical portrayals that promote
traditional sex-roles
The media confirm dominant gender discourse, ie,
dominant ideas about gender, by presenting it as a
dichotomous phenomenon
See next slide for the dichotomy of gender seen in the
media
 The media should produce more realistic portrayals of
women to resolve this problem

23.  Women
 Underrepresentation
 Family context
 Low-status jobs
 No authority
 No Power
 Related to others
 Passive
 Emotional
 Dependent
 Submissive
 indecisive
 Men
 Overrepresentation
 Work context
 High-status positions
 Authority
 Powerful
 Individual
 Active
 Rational
 Independent
 Resistant
 resolute

24.  The above feminist perspectives have been criticised by cultural
studies/ post-structural feminists on the grounds that:
1. There are exceptions in the media to the dichotomy discussed above,
ie, there are gender portrayals that contradict this dichotomy
2. They fail to account for the fact that:
i. Mainstream women’s media propagate patriarchal values
ii. Many women consume these media products
 They accuse other feminist perspectives of seeing women as passive
audiences
 They believe that women take an active part in meaning-making
 They don’t have to accept the preferred readings encoded into texts

25. 3. They seem to assume that there is a reality out there the media should reflect
 Cultural studies/ post-structural feminists suggest that instead a shared reality
is created by the media and audiences
 Media texts are a site of struggle over meaning, they are not transparent
cultural prescriptions
 Media texts, therefore, are polysemic and offer diverging and sometimes
conflicting articulations of femininity
4. They assume that gender is a stable distinction between men and women that
ought to be represented correctly
 Cultural studies/ post-structural feminists suggest that the media don’t
represent a distorted picture of gender but reflects modes of thinking, ie,
norms and values about gender
 The media help to construct gender along traditional modes of thinking
 However, there are competing representations of gender becos the media is a
site of struggle.

26.  The term cyberfeminism was first used in 1991 by artists
working with the VNS Matrix, an Australian feminist
digital art project
 Women who describe themselves as cyberfeminists have
resisted attempts to come up with a definition for the
theory. However, some definitions include:
 A new wave of feminist theory and practice concerned
with issues of identity in cyberspace
 A revolt of women and computers against dominant
world views

27.  It’s believed to have emerged in reaction against the
pessimism of 1980s feminist approaches that stressed the
masculine nature of technology and science
 Cyberfeminist approaches to new media suggest:
1. There is a digital divide along gender lines, ie,
 Women tend to be absent from or underrepresented in
the organisations that produce new media
There is unequal access to new media
 There is stereotypical representation of men and women
that reinforces dominant ideas about gender

28. 2. This divide is the result of several factors.
3. There are differences within cyberfeminism over the gendering of new
media
i. One school of thought sees new technologies as essentially feminine
 These theorists point to the fact that new media have led to social
relations that are associated with femininity, ie, new technologies
have led to communications and texts that are:
 Non-linear
 Decentralised
 Unhierarchical
 They therefore conclude that digital media are feminine

29. ii. Another school argues that digital media are consistent with
patriarchy, ie, men dominate the production of digital media and the
meanings produced within it
 The role of cyberfeminists if to carve out space for women within
these media
4. There are also differences within utopian and more dystopian
perspectives
 Utopians say digital technologies are new technologies
 They give women a chance to create new languages, images and
identities
 Therefore, new media can be reprogrammed to meet women’s needs

30. Purposes and meanings that are different from those of men, ie, to
positively construct images of femininity
ii. Using new media to articulate and redefine women’s experiences
iii. Using new media to redefine reality on women’s terms
iv. Empowering women by demystifying new technologies
 Cyberfeminism is therefore not just about theory but practice as well
 The above goals are being pursued by:
 Women working in cyberfiction
 Digital art
 Digital film
 Computer games, etc

31.  Cyberfeminists are creating:
 websites celebrating women’s experiences
Participatory electronic art
 Electronic networks for women
 Images that counter sexist stereotypes
They are pursuing strategic seperation, ie, women only
mailing lists, chat groups etc
They are also involved in feminist research and critiques
of new media

32. Thank You