• Systemic societal sexism – MISOGYNY. This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women, or put simply: SEXISM a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society, otherwise known as PATRIARCHY.
• Institutional, individual levels of sexism
• Michelene Wandor, ‘sexism was coined by analogy with the term racism in the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s
• Laura Mulvey – 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. another is 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‘ 
• Scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION)
• Vouyerism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking)
• Jacques Lacan – 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‘
• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics
• Raunch culture – 3rd wave feminism

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
• plurality

Intersectionality: Queer theory

• 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
• More focus on individual agency – you can be whoever you want, whenever you want