REPRESENTATION — GENDER THEORY: KEY THEORISTS AND VOCABULARY

Make sure you understand the meaning of the key terms (see the relevant blogs posts but feel free to use Oxford dictionary or media studies handbooks to chose an explanation/phrasing that is suits your style of expression and understanding)

• Male gaze: an act of looking that treats women as objects and posits men as dominant and active lookers. In media this is operated with the use of close ups on particular parts of the body (legs, face, lips breast) and with specific ways of storytelling and characterization (men do things, women stand by them)

Or else: A manner of treating women’s bodies as objects to be surveyed, which is associated by feminists with hegemonic masculinity, both in everyday social interaction and in relation to their representation in visual media: see also (objectification: the act of transforming bodies/persons/subjects into sexual objects to be seen. Usually applied to how women are seen by men)

 In film theory and media: men are both the subject of the gaze and the ones who shape the action and women are the objects of the gaze and the ones who are shaped by the action.

• Voyeurism (Scopophilia): an act of gaining gratification by observing others as sexual objects. According to Laura Mulvey, classical cinema and visual media position male viewers to gain pleasure either by treating women as passive objects or by identifying with the male heroes (who are the ‘do-ers,’ the ones who push the narrative forward).
• Patriarchy: a fundamental feminist interpretation of the world according to which there is a systemic inequality between women and men. This takes many forms and encompasses sexual, social, cultural, material and political forms of domination and discrimination. Patriarchic ideas/mentalities control women’s command over and access to the labor market and to other public resources. These relations of control and domination are based on assumptions about how women and men ought properly to behave, assumptions that in turn frame how people understand their social worlds and organize their social lives.
• Sexualisation/Raunch Culture: A new way of understanding sexual and erotic representation of women in media and everyday life as a form of emancipation and self-empowerment. It has been subject to debate. Camila Paglia is an prominent intellectual support this reading and understands eroticization as as an act of creativity and liberation
• Post-feminism: a contested term that usually refers to a reaction to second wave feminism. It celebrates new ways of reading the image of women popular culture and consumer society. Elegance, beauty and fashion is now reconciled/combined with notions autonomy and self-empowerment. This strand of feminism has been criticized for being apolitical and in tune with ‘neo-liberal’, corporate and individualistic lifestyles.
• Female gaze: The emphasis on female perspective — both in society and media. The ways in which women and girls look at other females, at males, but also at things in the world. This concerns the kinds of looking involved, and how these may be related to the ways women identify with other persons, see other persons as ‘objects’ or how their perspective/gaze is reflected what they create or what they do.

Intersectionality: According to bell hook, gender oppression intersects with racial and economic forms of oppression. Black women have been either omitted from representation or misrepresented in accordance to one-dimensional stereotypes (oversexed, mammies, neurotic/angry women)

Gender Performativity and Judith Butler:

• Sex and gender: Sex is a biological form of classification that is assigned at birth. Gender is a social construction, a ‘learned’ pattern of behaviour. It is shaped by cultural norms but it is subject to change.
• Performativity of gender: gender is a ‘ritualized repetition of acts.’ Gender refers to ways of inhabiting one’s body and interacting with others. It is not an ‘essence’ but an form of self-understanding that is in dialogue with ways of self-presentation and social interaction (socialization)

Gender is a historical situation not a natural fact. The conventions, appearances and acts that prescribe what it means to be a woman or man change from time to time and from place to place. There is not a universal unchangeable way of being a gender.

Subversion: Subversion is the act of disrupting the expected/established/hegemonic ways acting out one’s gender. Men and women using body postures, clothes, accessories, modes of self-expression, ways of speaking, styles of interaction, professional roles, social activities and creative representations that are not usually associated with the conventions of their respective gender. A telling example drag-artists.