Orientalism-

• Edward Said, the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism
• the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism
• In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.‘
• POSTCOLONIALISM operates a series of signs maintaining the European-Atlantic power over the Orient by creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘. (Said, 1978:238)
• ‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’

THE ORIENT AS THE ‘OTHER’

• The recognition of the ‘Other’ is mainly attributed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
•  A good way to develop an understanding of this term is in his exploration of the mirror stage of child development, whereby, as we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

• all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject
• Ideological state apparatus (ISA)
• we are socially constructed and what socially constructs us is ‘despite its diversity and contradictions . . . the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’,

Frantz Fanon

• Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases such as ‘dirty Nigger!’ or ‘look, a Negro!’ 
• as an early critical thinker of postcolonialism, Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity. 
• 1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
• 2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
• 3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

• ‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light
•  Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests.
•  hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT.

Commons letter To The Free

• Q1:How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?
• Q2: Can you apply Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action to this music video?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

Ghost Town by The Specials 

• Q1: Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?
• Q2: How does this text apply to Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation-mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.

• Paul Gilroy is insistent that ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’ (2004:13) His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency.
• As Barry notes the stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions is indeed a characteristic of postcolonial criticism. Often found by foregrounding questions of cultural difference and diversity, as well as by celebrating ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’.
•  Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.

• COLONIALISM – acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
• POST COLONIALISM – the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands.
• DIASPORA – a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale.
• BAME – a term used in the UK to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic people.
• DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS – a term describing the internal conflict experienced by subordinated groups in an oppressive society.
• CULTURAL ABSOLUTISM / RACIAL ESSENTIALISM – when one cultural is deamed more supreme than another and all have to belong to one cultural/the belief in a genetic or biological essence that defines all members of a racial category.
• CULTURAL SYNCRETISM – is when distinct aspects of different cultures blend together to make something new and unique. Culture is a large category, this blending can come in the form of religious practices, architecture, philosophy, recreation, and even food. It’s an important part of your culture.
• ORIENTALISM – refers to the Orient, in reference and opposition to the Occident; the East and the West, respectively. Edward Said said that Orientalism “enables the political, economic, cultural and social domination of the West, not just during colonial times, but also in the present.”
• APPROPRIATION – the act of taking something such as an idea, custom, or style from a group or culture that you are not a member of and using it yourself: Theft is the dishonest appropriation of another person’s property.
• CULTURAL HEGEMONY – cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society.
• THE PUBLIC SPHERE (HABERMAS) – Habermas says, “We call events and occasions ‘public’ when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs”. Jürgen Habermas defines ‘the public sphere’ as a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens”.
• THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING IN TERMS OF FAIR REPRESENTATION OF MINORITY GROUPS / INTERESTS – PSB’s role is to reflect multiple community interests and news, and different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds to be all inclusive to there audience.

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the Close Study Products ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Letter to the Free’ in your answer

If we are referring to the narrative theory then there are many theorists that we can apply, for example is Todorov’s Tripartite which explores a range of ideas such as how all the narratives should follow a structure equilibrium , disruption and ends with a new equilibrium.

Both CSP’s (“Letter to the Free and “Ghost Town”) clearly follow Todorov’s Triparite, because for example this is clearly shown in Ghost Town of how the person is driving through the streets of London and how it has become a “ghost town”. Then the disequilibrium begins when the car that is being driven through the town just begins swerving out of control as if it something had suddenly impacted it. But then we can see that the new disequilibrium is found when everything goes back to normal when the band is seen at the beach peacefully playing around with rocks, which could symbolise that everything is going back to normal, because the last scene that was present was a scene where everything span out of control and then now the disequilibrium is now peacefully chilling out at a beach skimming rocks.

Anyhow now relating to “Common’s Letter to the Free” they also follow Todorov’s Tripartite narrative theory. The video begins with a rolling camera going through jail cells and then you finally get to a black box kind of shape, which could represent that black lives are infinite and are equal to every other colour or race on this planet where the message “black lives matter” could come in depending on how people interpret the music video. The disruption in the music video is when Common is seen in a prison playing music which some people can say this is a way of showing ‘freedom’. But finally the new equilibrium of the music video is the empty shots of the prison and zooming out shot of a house most likely ‘Common’s’ house, with the outdoor shot symbolising freedom and as we can clearly see from the music video he has managed to gain freedom if he is clearly at home and not in the beginning equilibrium which is in jail. But then once again towards the end you see the black box appears again to remind us of the purpose of the song which is that black lives are infinite and matter like all the races on the planet.

In conclusion Todorov’s Narrative Theory is very good to follow because not only does it follow a narrative theory to make the music video and song easier to follow, but also applying a narrative theory also helps you understand the message that is being put across in each of the music videos which have been presented to us. Like in “Ghost Town” we could clearly see that the music video and the message it was trying to deliver is all about the economy crisis that happened to London during the 80’s but one example of this was when the car lost control which insinuates that everything was going well until one day where the economy had just collapsed and lost control, also when you also relate to somewhere like London you don’t really consider it a ghost town so the theory being used here is the Levi-Strauss theory of binary opposites which clearly states that London is a place where many people live and is not a ‘ghost town’ at all. Anyways using a music video can be a visual way to really help you get your message across to people and get them to understand the little hints which is why applying a narrative to music videos is important.

I believe that ideas about narrative in analysing music videos are useful. When we consider a narrative which is the story and when we theories we can consider applying according to “narrative” we should consider 4 main theorists: Tztevan Todorov and his 3-part structure theory where he says there’s a beginning, middle, end to a story and has three parts to which also applies, the equilibrium where everything is balanced and good nothing, in particular, affects the story yet which then shifts into disequilibrium/Disruption as there is conflict, change, an issue that is introduced and finally finishes into resolution/new equilibrium where the story gets balanced again after the issue or change is fixed or accepted. Claude Levi-Strauss on binary oppositions states that we do not know what truth or meaning is but we know what it isn’t for example we know Black isn’t White, Good isn’t Bad etc. Vladimir Propp’s theory on character Types and Functions where he believes a character type is a certain trait or role a character will have to progress the story, for example, the Hero(protagonist), Villain (antagonist), princess(the character who gets rescued in one way or form) etc. Chatman theory resolves on Satellites and kernels where main elements of the stories that if changed, affected the story greatly are referred to kernels, for example, the film is a sci-fi planet, whereas satellites are changeable elements of the stories that won’t affect the story too much Eg. he has a blue hat in part 1 but in part 2 changes to a black hat.

Using this knowledge as we look at “Letter to the Free” by Common lyrics and signs relates to historical and current oppression of African Americans as he talks bout how jail is modern slavery as it is a form of business where they have people to do cheap labour for them to which they sell and that why there must always be people in jail. Commons Music video starts off in the inside a prison and is presented throughout the video which is a direct representation to who he is singing, the black community as prisoners,  In the music video Commons, there is a black box that also is shown throughout the video to which “represents the infinite thing about blackness and blackness can’t be defined in time or space” and what common means by “defined” he is referring to the labelling of black people. When considering Commons video in a narrative theoretical sense it doesn’t have a clear narrative and doesn’t follow so trying to apply one of the theories Tztevan Todorov and his 3-part structure theory is hard, however, when we consider Tztevan Todorov and his 3-part structure theory to the video in the sense of the beginning when common is in the prison alone is short equilibrium but when were shown the flashes of the black box we can argue for this to be the disequilibrium to the point of the end where the black box is sort of “resting” in the filed at the end of the video and is the new equilibrium.

When we look at Ghost town written by Jerry Dammers by the Artists British two-tone band “The specials” which was released in 1981. It has a more clear narrative at the beginning of the music video where the shots are quite still and are of the car and the surroundings which is the equilibrium but then it transitions to the disequilibrium as the shot of the car gets shakier as the car swerves around but then once again returns back to normal to which is then transitions to the new equilibrium so this relates to Tztevan Todorov and his 3-part structure theory again. When looking at the video there could be the symbolism of was happening at the time of the 1980s in the UK where CND ws starting to happen what is the Campaign for the disarmament of nuclear weapons so at the beginning of the video could be the symbolism of how people have hidden away due to fear of nuclear weapons and in the middle when they are swerving is the fear getting to them but at the end, when they are skipping rocks, is the sort of acceptance that something bad could happen.

Overall I believe that ideas about narrative in analysing music videos are useful as with the correct theories we get a greater understanding for the story and what it portrays that you might not commonly notice at first glance achieve this though the theorists of Tztevan Todorov, Chapman, Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss even though I focused on Tztevan Todorov.

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

Systemic societal sexism: Sexism that is propagated by systems within society

The President of the United States, talks and thinks about women. This would be known as 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 Sexism: Within and perpetuated by institutions in society.

Individual Sexism

According to 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‘

“the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion” – Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, 1975

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. – In other words, media has a sexual imbalance – the women are presented as exhibitionists, something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ , while the men are there to look and admire.

scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION)

 vouyerism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking)

fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘ – The focus of one particular thing [usually sexual])

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‘- This, she argues, affects how people see themselves. People define themselves through what they see, as argued by Lacan, so women and men can grow to define themselves based on the media presented through the “male gaze”. She also, discusses the position of the audience, categorising them as spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘. ‘Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like‘, thus, he must control the look, and thereby, the narrative. Made possible ‘by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify‘. Rules and conventions of mainstream narrative cinema, that appear to follow ‘according to the principles of the ruling ideology‘. In other words, the dominant look is always hetero, rather than homosexual.

Third wave feminism – “Raunch culture” – 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.

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

Intersectionality:  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‘

More focus on individual agency in fourth wave feminism – About gender identity and how people present gender as different identities to others.

Jean Kilbourne – from the 2nd wave of feminism, she analysed how adverts sexualise women and reinforce gender roles in society. She claims that advertising

Also seen as ‘Raunch culture’. Which is a sexualised performance

• Pluralism
• Inter sexuality
• 4th WAY FEMINISM
• More focus on individual agency

systemic societal sexism, institutional sexism, individual sexism – misogyny, patriarchy, sexism

first, second, third and fourth wave of feminism. The first wave was from 1850 through to 1940, it focused on legal issues mainly women’s right to vote. The second wave was post wwII from 1960-1980, the slogan was “The Personal is Political”. It identified women’s cultural and political inequalities and encouraged women to understand how their personal lives reflected sexist power structures. The third wave began in the 1990s, the main focus was women’s rights to do what they want with their own bodies, including birth control and abortion. Fourth-wave feminism is a phase of feminism that began around 2012 and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women and the use of internet tools, and is centered on intersectionality.

Laura Mulvey speaks about the ‘male gaze’. By this she means the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. In narrative cinema women are over sexualised and objectified.

scopophilia sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity; voyeurism.

fetishism – a form of sexual behaviour in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, activity, part of the body, etc.

Jaques Lacan was a french psychologist who focused on child development, particularly the ‘mirror stage’. This is when a young child views themself in a mirror, it is said that this term can also be applied to to the mirroring process that occurs between an audience and the screen

Toril Moi set clear distinctions between these three terms:

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

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

‘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 and Stephenson

intersectionality – the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

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

• 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

SYSTEMATIC SOCIETAL SEXISM

The President of the United States, talks and thinks about women. This would be known as 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

SEXISM

• level of institution (institutional)
• individual

WAVES OF FEMINISM

• suffragettes FIRST WAVE
• 1960s Barry makes the point that although the women’s movement was not the start of feminism, ‘the feminist literary criticism of today is the product of the women’s movement of the 1960’s’ . In other words, the issue of women’s inequality has a history that pre-dates the 1960’s, see for examples: Mary Wollstonecraft, (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Women; Virginia Woolf(1929) A room of one’s own; Simone de Beauvoir(1949) The Second Sex.

• 1970s SECOND WAVE,
• This period is often termed second wave 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.

• 1990’s THIRD WAVE
• 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. 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

• FORTH WAVE
• also looked to explore these contradictary arguments and further sought to recognise and use the emancipatory tools of new social platforms to connect, share and develop new perspectives, experiences and responses to oppression, ‘tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online‘ (Cochrane, 2013). As such, from the radical stance of #MeToo to the Free the Nipple campaign, which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported (which may encourage you to re-evaluate your initial reading of her video Wrecking Ball above), the use of new media technologies has been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of critical thinking.
• 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’

LAURA MULVEY

• Second wave feminist
• inspired by Freud
• ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘
• the male gaze
• ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’
• women are objectified and sexualised
• scopophilia – pleasure of looking
• vouyerism – looking is sexualised
• fetishism – focus on one thing over another usually of a sexual nature
• dehumanises

JEAN KILBOURNE

• Second wave feminist
• In the media education foundation
• TED TALK – ‘the dangerous ways ads see women’
• secretary, waitress
• “babies can recognise logos from 6 months”
• BOOKS – Deadly persuasion (1999) – “if you want to get into people’s wallets first you have to get into their lives” (exploitation of human desires) creates a “toxic culture environment”
• So sexy so soon (2008) – “girls are encouraged to objectify themselves”
• Can’t buy my love (2012)

JACK LE CAN

• also inspired by Freud
• you aren’t born with consciousness
• mirror stage – moment when we recognise who we are (recognise they have consciousness)
• we only know the other, we can’t see ourselves, only see a reflection

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

INTERSECTIONALITY

more focus on individual agency (more power to individuals)