Misogyny: is defined as hatred of women or girls, expressed as disgust, intolerance or entrenched prejudice, serving to legitimate women’s oppression.

Patriacrchy: Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. 

Sexism from an institutional perspective and at an individual level. Looks at groups, organisations.

Feminism: critical articulation for equality. Four waves of feminism. After the first wave of feminism, which was galvanised by organisations such as, the British Women’s Suffrage Committee (1867), the International Council of Women (1888), the The International Alliance of Women (1904), and so on who, in early part of the 20th Century, worked to get women the right to vote.

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

The work of Laura Mulvey and specifically focus on her 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. She argues that females are looked at and males are the lookers.

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); another is fetishism, the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ which is dehumanising as they become objects and not people. ‘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’.

Sut Jhally‘s work at the Media Education Foundation, draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.

Raunch Culture – 3rd Wave Feminism

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, coined by Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movement of the 1960’s and ’70’s, challenging and recontextualising some of the definitions of femininity that grew out of that earlier period. In particular, the third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism. Eg, a difference between a black woman’s experience and a white woman’s.

• 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

Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women’s studies. “Queer theory” can have various meanings depending upon its usage. Two common usages of queer theory include a 1) methodology for literary analysis and 2) a productive practice of theory.

Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed to 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’.