Feminist Critical Thinking

TORIL MOI – Distinctions of feminine, female and feminist:

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

JUDITH BUTLER- Concept 1: Gender as performance

Judith Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory and literary theory. She is best known for her book ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.’ In this book she explores and challenges the existing ‘feminist model’ and how it has defined the female gender. Butler says that historically we have viewed gender in a binary fashion, meaning that men and women are divided into distinct categories that are fixed and cannot be changed.

She argues against this and says that ‘gender should be seen as a human attribute that shifts and changes.’ She believes by categorising ourselves in this way, limits our ability to choose our own identities. Her views are complimentary to modern identities such as non-binary and gender fluid and states that gender is a “performative social construct”. She believes that gender categorises ourselves to a stereotype which can have negative connotations, limiting our own unique identity where we feel more insecure about the characteristics of our personality.

She also expresses the idea that gender identity is changeable and fluid a we ‘perform’ and display different elements of our gender identity at different times, in differing situations and around different people. Her theories also link to David Gauntlet’s theory about identities who says that we construct our own identities by being influenced by different people/experiences/interests which may not be the “traditional cultural norm.” Butler mentions that by believing gender is binary promotes patriarchy and the negative dominant ideology of women by separating them into distinct categories and constantly comparing them to each other, continuing with this old fashioned “gender battle.” Contrasting to common knowledge, it limits both genders and forces a toxic stereotype of what masculine and feminine means and what being a man or a woman means.

LAURA MULVEY- Concept 2: The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist, best known for her essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” written in 1973 and published in 1975. Her most famous and relevant quotes are:

Mulvey took inspiration from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s concepts in which she hopes to use as a “political weapon”. She utilises this to argue that Hollywood inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and the concept of “the male gaze”. According to Mulvey, women are coded with ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ and states that the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the ‘bearer of the look’, meaning that women are purely there and with everything they do is for a male’s pleasure.

The Male Gaze refers to how viewers engage in visual media. It suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze, women are visually positioned as an object for heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts and occupation are less important to the male desire.

JOHN BERGER – Concept 1: Ways of seeing

John Berger has similar concepts. “Ways of seeing” is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger. He begins by exploring the history of the female nudity or the status of oil paint, his landmark series showed how art revealed the social and political systems in which it was made. He also examined what had changed in our ways of seeing in the time between the art was made and today.

JEAN KILBOURNE- Concept 1: Visual narrative media

Jean Kilbourne is known for her work on the image of women in advertising. She introduced the idea of educating about media literacy as a way of preventing problems she believed were originating from mass media advertising campaigns. Kilbourne began her exploration of the connection between advertising and several public health issues, including violence against women, eating disorders and addiction. Her concepts are now mainstream and include the concepts of tyranny of the beauty ideal, the connection between the objectification of women and violence, the themes of liberation and weight control exploited in tabacco advertising aimed and women, addiction as a love affair and the target of alcoholics by the alcohol industry.

1ST WAVE FEMINISM:

• 1848 to 1920’s
• Suffragette and Suffragists movements.
• women campaigned for basic rights such as an education.
• Virginia Woolf touches upon the fact that women have less rights to such things as education, art and literature. she challenges this and asks what if men had the same restriction? Society would have missed out on people like Shakespeare. And was he really talented? or did he just have a good education?

“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.”(Michelene Wandor 1981:13)

2ND WAVE FEMINISM:

• 1960/70’s – movement of contraception
• Societal counteraction towards previous feminist ideas and positive change sparked a feminist cultural movement that began to shift societies views on abortion, homosexuality, birth control and divorce etc.
• Singular, one dimensional. Centred around middle class, white feminists

NAOMI WOLF- Concept 1: 3rd Wave Feminism

Third- wave feminism began in the early 1990s, coined by Naomi Wolf as a response to the generational gap between the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, challenging and re-contextualising some of the definitions of the 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.

[Pluralism – Pluralism is the idea that people of different cultures can coexist in society even though they have different political opinions.]

[Intersectional – intersectionality is the concept that all oppression is linked.]

Meaning that feminism became an umbrella term for equality, not just middle class white women but for all different women with different expressions and even now it is updated to equality for men too.

Including:

• 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 on the one hand, the idea of liberation involves new freedoms for sexual exhibition, experimentation and presentation. – women were learning to embrace their sexuality and addressing taboo subjects related to sex.

‘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’

‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex negative’ approach of older feminists.’ (344)Barker and Jane (2016 p. 344)

4TH WAVE FEMINISM:

4th-wave feminism looked to explore contradictary arguments and further sought to recognise and use 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.” The #Metoo and the Free the Nipple campaign which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported has broadened out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of thinking

MULTICULTURAL INTERSECTIONALITY:

you cannot ‘understand Black women’s experiences of discrimination by thinking separately about sex discrimination and race discrimination’ (ibid)Sigle-Rushton & Lindström, 2013 p131

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed ot the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’ – Simply, women who are not white experience an even bigger depth of oppression from society.

Rather intersectionality highlights the way ideas and concepts such as ‘female‘, ‘feminist‘, ‘feminine‘ intersect with other concepts, ideas and approaches, such as, sexuality, class, age, education, religion, ability. A way of exploring these ideas is through the work of bell hook.

bell hook advocates media literacy, the need to engage with popular culture to understand class struggle, domination, renegotiation and revolution. Put another, encouraging us all to ‘think critically’ to ‘change our lives’.

QUEER THEORY:

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‘

VAN ZOONEN

Similarly, Lisbet Van Zoonen also 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.’ (Hendry & Stephenson) Van Zoonen, develops and applies ideas of cultural hegemony  and interpellation (bring into being or give identity to (an individual or category) towards feminist studies. Van Zoonen, prioritises the realm of popular culture as the site of struggle, where identities are continually being reconstructed.