Sexism refers to the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically, on the assumption that the male is always superior to the female‘ (1981:13).

In the social, political and economic realm, this meant demands for equal pay, equal education, equal opportunities, free contraception and abortion, greater provision for childcare and so on

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Scopophilia– taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION

Vouyerism– the sexual pleasure gained in looking

Laura Mulvey– wrote an essay ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema.’ Laura says there is an imbalance between the active male and passive female.

Fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘), the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ – ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’.

Mulvey draws on the work of Jacques Lacan (‘this mirror moment‘), highlighting the parallel between the ‘mirror stage’ of child development and the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen – ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. She also, discusses the position of the audience, categorising them as spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

In movies the dominant look is always hetero, rather than homosexual in men

3rd wave feminism- charcaterised by a rebellion against Mothers.

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Put another, it suggests that we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions