• 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