1. F EMINISM A Level Media Studies

2. F EMINISM Feminists seek to challenge the unfair and unequal distribution of power and wealth in patriarchal society. A patriarchal society is one based on male rule and domination. Feminists are particularly interested in the contribution made by the media to society’s dominant ideas about gender roles.

3. G ENDER R OLES The mass media play a crucial role in socialisation – teaching us how to behave and think in ways that our culture finds acceptable. Sex is biological, gender is CULTURAL. What does it mean to be a woman/man?

4. G ENDER S TEREOTYPES Femininity Caring Nurturing Emotional Domestic Sensitive Passive Soft Gentle Masculinity Tough Providing Rational Public/work orientated Thick skinned Active Rough Hard Lower status...poorl y paid work – childcare, nursing, teaching Higher status...Influenti al roles...well paid jobs...political leadership Imbalance of power

5. S TEREOTYPING Feminists have made great progress in eroding those stereotypes. However, some may argue that they have been replaced by equally disempowering stereotypes... Vicky Pollard clip

6. F IRST WAVE FEMINISM Mid 19 th – early 20 th century. Fight for social and political equality. Struggle for women’s suffrage (right to vote) Key concerns included education, employment and marriage laws. Successes – higher education for women, married women’s property rights and the widening of access to professions such as medicine.

7. S ECOND WAVE FEMINISM Liberation movement of 1960s and 1970s. Characterised by struggles for equal pay, equal rights at work and better representation in public bodies such as Parliament. Access to contraception. Highly publicised activism. Miss America 1968 Stereotype of humourless, dowdy, man-hating feminist. Made in Dagenham clip

8. L AURA M ULVEY (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema The ‘male gaze’ The main source of visual pleasure in the cinema is the voyeuristic make viewer enjoying the image of the female body, Much of our media output assumes the spectator is male or constructs reality from a male POV. Women see themselves through the eyes of men. In order for a woman to experience pleasure from the film, she has to position herself in a similar role to the male viewer enjoying the spectacle.

9. T HIRD WAVE FEMINISM 1980s and 1990s Less emphasis on battles for equality More emphasis on the positive nature of ambiguity and difference (not all women are the same, it doesn’t matter) Spice girls and girl power Empowering heroines – Buffy and Xena.

11. 1987 – Glenn Close in Fatal Attracttion 1992 – Starship Troopers 2003 – Kill Bill Nike ad “the teeshirt gets wet from the inside only” Triumph – “New hair, new bra and if he don’t like it, new boyfriend” A new aggressive form of sexuality

12. N AOMI W OLF (1991) The Beauty Myth “Beauty is a currency like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics and in the modern age in the West, it is the last, best belief system that keeps male domination intact.” Images of ultra thin supermodels and the ‘perfect bodies’ glamourised by the media are indications of a patriarchal attack on women’s bodies. Women’s bodies and female sexuality have become commodities and the consequences are mental/physical illness, starvation diets and eating disorders.

13. A NGELA M C R OBBIE (1990) Girls’ magazines Magazines work alongside other socialising influences to reinforce an obsession with romance. They work ideologically to define for their audience the domestic roles of wife and mother that they should accept and embrace.

14. P OST FEMINISM Celebrates the diversity of identity available to women. Positive endorsement of consumerism Sometimes seen as ‘anti feminism’ If women know that femininity is a construct, then they can play with its signs, symbols and identities from a position of power Semiotic guerrilla warfare – meaning of signifiers such as high heels/lipstick/designer clothes can be shifted from powerless to powerful.

15. G AUNTLETT (2002) “Men and women are seen working side by side, as equals, in the hospitals, schools and police stations of television land. Movie producers are wary of having women as screaming victims, and have realised that kick ass heroines do better business. Advertisers have now realised that audiences will only laugh at images of the pretty housewife, and have reacted by showing women how to be sexy at work instead.” CNN clip