-Happens at a structural and textual level

Toril Moi’s set of definitions:

Feminist- a political position

Feminine- culturally defined characteristics

Female- a matter of biology

Laura Mulvey

She wrote an essay called ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’

She talks about the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.

‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female‘

Female representations are constructed around male ideology

Scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ )- Natural pleasure in looking

fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘)

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 (the first time you see yourself in a mirror and recognise the reflection as yourself)

Laura Mulvey uses this theory to suggest that when we watch other people in the media and recognise them as something like our self ‘a complex process of likeness and difference

Raunch culture

Raunch culture is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘

exploitation vs empowerment 

Intersectionality: Queer theory

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

Van Zoonen and Hook

Lisbet Van Zoonen highlights the idea that the concept of ‘woman’ is not a homogenous, collective noun. That students need to be aware of the differences between women, that ‘gender is not the defining quality alone for women, and intersects with race, sexuality and class.’ 

Bell hook advocates media literacy, the need to engage with popular culture to understand class struggle, domination, renegotiation and revolution