Systemic, Societal Sexism

• Misogyny – hatred of women
• Patriarchy – a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership
• Level of institution – sexism or discrimination in companies
• Individual – operating at the level of women (poster, picture, music video etc)

1st Wave of Feminism

• Suffragettes
• galvanised by organisations such as, the British Womens Suffrage Commitee (1867)

2nd Wave

• Nevertheless, feminist critical thought became much more prominent and pronounced during the counter cultural movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which heralded, among other changes: the facilitating of birth control and divorce, the permitting of abortion and homosexuality, the abolition of hanging and theatre censorship.
• In contrast, ‘at the beginning of the 1970’s the Women’s Liberation Movement set great store by the process of consciousness raising’

Laura Mulvey

• ‘the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion‘
• 1st wave
• Narrative Cinema
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Male Gaze = pleasure is masculine – aimed towards man – woman as image, man as bearer of the look
• She argues that there is a sexual imbalance, there’s a split between male and female
• Women are exhibitionists (there to dance, move draw attention) men are there to look
•  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’.
• Scopophilia – the pleasure in looking (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ 
• Vouyerism – the sexual pleasure gained in looking – skewed to the male experience
• Fetishism – when you focus on one specific thing over another (usually sexualised) – therefore objectifying women and de-humanises them.
• Also draws on Jacques Lacan – child development – proposes that when you are born you have no idea who you are and have no concioucness
• Lacan – The Mirror Stage = there is a moment where we recognize who we are = the moment we realise who we are
• The Other = we never see ourselves and we have only ever seen a reflection of ourselves – In media we are always looking at mirrors and that leads us to believe who we are.
• Not good for women as women are then going to grow up thinking themselves as ‘man wants a woman’ and will assume that the way women are on the screen is the way that women should be – this is unhealthy.

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

Sut Jhally

• Dreamworld- looking at music videos and how women are portrayed
• Female sexuality was used to portray and advertise brands and songs
• Shows how culture expects us to be men and women
•  At the centre of the dreamworld is the female body and drawing on the key concepts introduced by Mulvey (objectification, voyeurism, scopophilia, fetishism) it is clear both how the dreamworld is constructed and who it appears to be constructed for.

3rd Wave Feminism

• Sometimes known as raunch culture:

‘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

• Old ideasof feminism became outdated and the phrase ‘Feminism’ seemed almost derogatory

According to Barker and Jane (2016), third wave feminism, which is regarded as having begun in the mid-90’s is the ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex negative’ approach of older feminists.’ (344) and put forward the following recognisable characteristics:

• 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

According to Ariel Levy, in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs raunch culture is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘ (2006:74). In other words, while on the one hand, the idea of liberation involves new freedoms for sexual exhibition, experimentation and presentation, on the other, it may well be playing out the same old patterns of exploitation, objectification and misogyny?

• Pluralism/Intersectionality – Initial critical ideas that looked at the plurality of feminist thought can be found in the early work around Queer Theory. In the UK the pioneering academic presence in queer studies was the Centre for Sexual Dissedence in the English department at Sussex University, founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore in 1990 (Barry: 141). In terms of applying queer theory to feminist critical thought, Judith Butler, among others expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of: male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman. Arguing, that this is too simple and does not account for the internal differences that distinguishes different forms of gender identity, which according to Butler ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . normalising categories of oppressive structures‘ (14:2004).
• Butler suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural a set of categories to be played out and performed by individual subjects in individual moments in time and space.

4th Wave Feminism

• States that you are able to be whoever you want whenever and wherever