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)