Overview

• According to Michelene Wandor, “sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s.
• Sexism is the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other agnostically, with the assumption that the male is more superior then the female
• The issue of women’s inequality has history that dates back to the 1960s.
• Female critical thought has become more prominent during the cultural movements during the late 1960s and are 1970s.
• The late 1960s and early 1970s were known as the “second wave of feminism”, which happened after the first wave of feminism, which was galvanized by organizations such as the British Women’s Suffrage Committee of 1867, the International Council of Women of 1988 and the International Alliance of Women of 1904, which had worked in order to give women the rights to vote.
• According to Wandor, the Women’s Liberation Movement influenced everyday conduct and attitudes. Whereas, Barry said that it “exposed the mechanisms of patriarchy…which perpetuated sexual inequality”
• In social, political and economical realm, there were demands for equal pay, education, opportunities, free contraception, abortion and greater provisions for childcare.
• In summary, the definitions are:
  • Female = a matter of biology
  • Feminist = a political position
  • Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics.

Laura Mulvey

• She is the writer of the 1975 Polemical essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.
• Central to Mulvey’s thesis was the role of the male gaze, which is a theoretical approach that suggests that the role of “women as an image, man as the bearer of the looks”
• A quotation taken from Mulvey’s essay. = “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed and their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact”
• Mulvey makes it clear that “the cinema offers a number of pleasures”. With one of the pleasures being based on scopophilia (taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling an subjective gaze”. The other pleasures include voyeurism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking) and fetishism (the quality of a cut out…stylists and fragmented).
• Mulvey draws on the work of Jacques Laban, which highlights the parallel between the “mirror stage” of child development and the mirroring process which occurs between an audience and a screen.
• According to Mulvey, “Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like‘, thus, he must control the look, and thereby, the narrative. Made possible ‘by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify”.

Third and Fourth Wave feminism

• Third wave feminism began in the early 1990s and according to Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged and recontextualised some of the definitions of feminist that grew out of that earlier period.
• The third wave sees Women’s lives as intersectional and it demonstrated a pluralism towards race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion and nationality.
• According the Kira Cochran’s, the fourth wave of feminism began in 2013 and raises the issues of intersectionality and nw issues, such as body shaming, privacy, rape culture and pornography.
• Fourth wave feminism also seeks to recognize the potential of new social platforms to connect, share, and develop new experiences, perspectives and responses
• Fourth wave feminism opposes to oppression and are tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online‘ (Cochran’s 2013)

Can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge and life

Parody v Pastiche

Pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

Parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

“The Simpsons relishes its self-referentiality and frequently engages in pastiche” – Gray (2005:5)

Intertextuality: surface signs, gestures & play

Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’

• BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
• INTERTEXTUALITY is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts

Surface and style over substance

If it the priority is play, then the emphasis is on the surface, in other words, if the main focus is the idea of just connecting one product to another, then the focus is superficial, shallow, lacking depth, so ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘

In terms of the key principles of art and design the priority is in formal elements: of shape, colour, texture, movement, space, time and so on. As opposed to more discursive principles of: narrative, character, motivation, theme, ideology

A brief economic, historical and societal backdrop to Postmodernism

In 1959, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘

Characteristic of modern societies, is the creation, development and concentration of centres of high consumption, with a displacement of both consumption and production that has radically altered the nature of societies and individuals living in them.

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities

This process of fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighborhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction

The focus on FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY is characterised and linked to an increase of consumption and the proliferation of new forms of digital technologies. In effect, another key characteristic of postmodernism is the development of fragmented, alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies

The loss of a metanarrative

A process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL

Jameson argued that parody implies a moral judgment or a comparison with previous societal norms. Whereas pastiche, such as collage and other forms of juxtaposition, occur without a normative grounding and as such, do not make comment on a specific historical moment

This links to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘ (1979:7) those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on. Lyotard points out that no one seemed to agree on what, if anything, was real and everyone had their own perspective and story

Definitions

• Pastiche – A parody but rather than mocking, it celebrates a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music imitating a style or character of the work of artists
• Parody – A work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
• Intertextuality – Shaping a text’s meaning by a different text
• Metanarrative – A narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge
• Hyperreality – An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality
• Simulacrum – Those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself
• Consumerist Society – A type of society where people devote a great deal of their life to “consuming”
• Fragmentary Identities – Presence of more than one sense of identity within a single human body
• Implosion – A collapse of a system
• Cultural Appropriation- The inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another culture

• Pastiche – A pastiche is a work that imitates other works in a positive way, such as a homage. 
• Bricolage – A collection of works that are brought together in the creation of one work. 
• Intertextuality – The connection between different texts and the influence of some texts to other texts. 
• Implosion – The sudden collapse of something inwards 
• cultural appropriation – The use of other cultures by people of different cultures (often more dominant ones) outside their original cultural contexts. This is an example of how dominant cultures often use aspects of disadvantaged cultures without appreciation for those cultures. 

Postmodernism is a movement that focuses on the reality of the individual, denies statements that claim to be true for all people and is often expressed in a pared-down style in arts, literature and culture. An example of a thought of postmodernismis the idea that not all people would see stealing as negative.

• Pastiche – a pastiche is work that imitates other works but in a positive way.
• Bricolage – collection of works from a diverse range of things.
• Intertextuality – the relationship/connection between different texts and the influence of some texts to other texts. 
• Implosion – the sudden collapse of something inwards/ a sudden failure.
• cultural appropriation – the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures. 

• Pastiche – Artistic work that imitates the work of a previous art work/ media text.
• Bricolage – the creation of something new through from a diverse media texts.
• Intertextuality – the meaning of a text being shaped by an other text
• Implosion– The collapse of a system/ the collapse of a message in a text.
• Cultural appropriation– the adoption of minority groups culture and used in dominant culture
• Parody– work that that imitates other work with ridicule or irony.
• Metanarrative– overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief.
• Hyperreality– a world based on simulation, making it difficult to distinguish reality from a simulation.
• Simulacrum – simulations are more real that the actual reality.
• Conumerist Society– a society in which consuming is the main objective.
• Fragmentary Identities– is that we construct multiple identities for different platforms.
• Reflexivity – the evaluation of our own beliefs and opinions.

what are you going to film?	Firstly, I am going to be filming a solo male who will appear by himself in all of the scenes that he is in. However, in order to split up the video I am also going to use some ‘filler’ scenes of landscapes of where he has previously been which will also be used towards the theme of old VS and Love VS Hate that I am trying to convey.
What do you need?	Tripod, Camera, Phone, Subject
Where?	I aim to film my scenes in desolate/ quiet/ abandoned places to further add to and emphasize my themes. Locations such as woods, fields, old buildings quiet streets.
Why?	As my themes evolve around quite sad/ depressing topics I think these sort of atmospheres will add to them.

My First Draft –