Systemic Societal Sexism

Misogyny: This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women

Sexism: 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

Patriarchy: a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society

Sexism from an institutional perspective and at an individual level:

Feminism: a critical articulation for equality

<Feminist<>Female<>Feminine>

As a final part of this brief introduction, it is useful to draw upon Toril Moi’s (1987) crucial set of distinctions between: ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’.

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

Laura Mulvey:

1975 polemical essay:

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘. 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.

One is based around Freudian psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION)

another is vouyerism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking)

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’.

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.

Music Video: ‘The Dreamworld?’

Sut Jhally‘s work at the Media Education Foundation (where Jean Kilbourne also produced much or her work) draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.

Raunch Culture – 3rd Wave Feminism

• 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

Intersectionality: Queer Theory

Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed ot the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ (2016:346). In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘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’ (ibid).