• Systemic Societal Sexism:
• misogyny – fear or hatred of women (subordination)
• sexism – discriminatory technique
• patriarchy – male power
• institutional (groups, organisations) perspective and individual perspective

Feminism: critical articulation for equality

• 4 waves of feminism
• Michelene Wandor, ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Defined simply, 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). – SECOND WAVE FEMINISM 60s, 70s – the pill, divorcee, sexuality
• 1st Wave – Suffer-gets
• fighting for the votes and parliamentary consideration
• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Theorists:

• Jean Kilbourne – looked at magazines, saw structuralism in sexism – women in mass media – second wave
• Laura Mulvey * – 1975 wrote essay – Visual pleasure and narrative cinema – second wave
• Central to her thesis was the role of the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.
• ‘What is visual pleasure’?
• Freud – scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze ‘
• Underpinned by Voyeurism (sexual pleasure in looking)
• Structured around patriarchy – ‘male lookers, females are the looked at’.
• Camera is representing male gaze – women exhibition
• 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‘  – Freud-en idea – dehumanisng
• 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‘. – Identify formation
• If patriarchy control representation, children will grow up believing dominate ideology/representation
• Sut Jhally‘s same as Mulvey but with Music Videos. Language of music videos linking to representation of women.

3 and 4 Wave Feminism:

• 3 Wave Feminism – Raunch Culture*: mid 90s
• Second seemed to disappear
• Barker and Jane (2016) >
• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion – pluralism/ inter-sectional
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics – change cultural – cyber activism
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyber-activism
• the re-appropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity
• 4 more active in cultural + pluralism – deveolopment on first
• ‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the 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’Hendry & Stephenson (2018:50

• Queer Theory – Intersectionality – multiple personalities/identities/representations
• Bell Hook(black feminist) – Multicultural Intersectionality
• power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’.