Having had enough of her boss’s sexual harassments, Gretchen Carlson files a lawsuit against Fox News founder Roger Ailes. Her bravery triggers a domino effect, culminating into a liberation movement.

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.

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.

Institutional Analysis:

A key area of media studies is to look at the role of companies, organisations, businesses, institutions. This takes the form of critical analysis. In other words, it is not looking at from a Business studies perspective – organisation, profit, structure – but rather from a sociological perspective – issues of ownership, power, control, behaviour management. I have made a post on my own blog which you can find here, but central to this kind of approach is Althusser’s notion of ISA’s (Ideological State Apparatus), which is often traced in media production by the way in which media texts INTERPELLATE (hail, call, construct, build, maintain) an ideological identity.