As a way of revisiting some of the ideas that we covered in terms of Feminist Critical Thinking, let’s look at Bombshell (2019, Dir. Jay Roach) a story based upon the accounts of the women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Follow this link for a brief summary of the plot.
LINKING WITH PREVIOUS THEORIES:
You can understand misogyny (the poor representation of women in the media) in the same way you can understand racism, homophobia, ultra-nationalism and other forms of casual stereotyping, bias and prejudice, that is, through TEXTUAL ANALYSIS and the notion of REPRESENTATION (for example, Lacan – mirror stage). We have also spoken about how such representations can be countered, altered, challenged, adjusted and so on through more postive and emancipatory representations (GRAMSCI – hegemonic struggle).
We ave also looked at the work Jean Kilborne from the Media Education Foundation. As well as the idea of the ‘Male Gaze’ articulated originally by Laura Mulvey, but developed later by others, such as Feminist Frequency.
However, prejudice may also occur beyond the level of text and can be identified as operating at a systemic INSTITUTIONAL intersection of race/class/gender <> power. Such ideas are proposed by Sut Jhally in his work for the Media Education Foundation – ‘Dreamworlds’ which looks at the role of MTV and music videos as a form of institutional / corporate sexism and misogyny
As such, this film provides a narrative of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, in the same way that we could look at other stories that are concerned with other institutional prejudices – racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia etc. In other words, this film presents a version of the story of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM and MISOGYNY. It suggests a link between the presentation / representation of the female form and the ideas of a ruling patriarchy (Fox News, specifically Roger Ailes) and perhaps explains why we are presented with the stories we are presented with and how those stories are presented to us.
In other words, it helps to explain the ideas of Louis Althusser in that the ruling ideas emerge from elements of the Ideological State Apparatus (look at the connection between Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump etc) and those ideas shape who we are, what we could be, want to be etc by a mechanism that he calls INTERPELLATION. For a visual representation of this watch the sequence in Bombshell where we see how the presenters are encouraged to dress and the way in which the choice of camera angles are used to reinforce this particular dress code.
Arguments presented against sexism and misogyny (ie the hegemonic struggle re: Gramsci) are raised through Feminist Critical Thinking and we have looked at early feminist movements as well as 2nd, 3rd and 4th wave feminist critics. We have even looked at theories of gender representation that look beyond binary gender values (male/female), which can termed as intersectionality, which first emerged as Queer Theory.