Structural level – organisation, groups society’s
Textual level- individual images, films
Untouchable – Harvey Weinstein documentary
Laura Mulvey
- wrote an essay in 1975 called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
- her thesis being the role of the male gaze
- theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘women as image, man as bearer of the look’
- active male (the one who’s looking), passive female (one who’s being looked at)
- scopophilia- sexual pleasure from watching others
- vouyerism- sexual pleasure gained in looking
- fetishism- erotic attachment to an inanimate object or an ordinarily asexual part of the human body
Jacques Lacan (the mirror moment)
- psychologist, specialised in child development
- Mulvey draws on his work on the mirror moment
- mirror stage of development, realising you’re a human being and your own person, at a young age
- Mulvey highlights the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen ‘complex process of likeness and difference’
Raunch Culture
3rd wave of feminism characterised as a reaction to 2nd wave feminists coined by Naomi Wolf . Fighting against the Anti-sexualised narrative of 2nd wave feminists. More aware of feminist divisons, gay, straight, black, white – less blanket terms across ‘all-woman’
‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’ – Hendy and Stephenson
Judith Butler
- applied queer theory to Feminist Critical Thinking
- reductionist, essentialist approach towards binary oppositions, male/female, feminine/masculine, man/woman
- suggests gender is fluid, changeable, plural