Feminist Theory and Waves

• Feminism is defined as advocating for women's equality. It involves achieving gender equality and influencing policy. Feminist movements support women's equal rights under the law. They recognize that women's oppression is connected to institutionalized discrimination.

Feminist Waves

• First Wave: Around the 1920s, focused on women's rights.
• Second Wave: From the late 1960s/1970s, emphasized women's liberation. It pushed for changes in legislation and culture.
• Third Wave: Started around the 1990s, incorporating ideas of intersectionality. It also included Queer theory, gender studies, and critiques of post-feminism.
• Fourth Wave: Possibly marked by online, platform-based activism. It uses hashtags like #MeToo and involves in-person actions, but debates around market-place feminism continue.

Feminist Media Studies

• Standpoint Theory
• Social Role Theory
• Male Gaze: Addresses how cinema and media perpetuate patriarchy. It also focuses on objectification.
• Identity Construction and Gender Performance in the Media
• Commodity Feminism
• Post-Feminism
• Feminist Surveillance Studies
• Applicable social science theories: social comparison theory

Feminist Critiques of Research

• Androcentric Epistemologies: Looks at things through a male-oriented perspective. It examines how knowledge is studied and the frameworks used, questioning who is known, how we know, and what is known (Krijnen, 2017, p. 2).
• Feminist scholars and activists have created their own theories and methodologies.
• Feminist Empiricism: Advocates removing androcentric values from research. It considers how research questions are asked and who interprets data.
• Feminist Standpoint Theory
• Feminist Postmodernism theories

Standpoint Theory

• Developed by Sandra Harding, this feminist theory argues that the knower and what is known hold equal importance. Considers knowledge to be socially situated. It posits that marginalized people are more objective and have a clearer understanding of how power operates from the outside.
• Critique: Essentialist in potentially attributing specific essences or characteristics.

Social Role Theory

• Alice Eagly (1987) developed theory about sex differences and behavior.
• Sex roles are taught through society and its division of labor.
• Industrialized societies often naturalize stereotypes about roles as essential dispositions.
• Situated within both social science(empiricism) and postmodern feminism
• This can be studied through sociological ethnographic methods or content/ discourse analysis of media samples.

The Male Gaze

• Laura Mulvey (1975) explored this concept in "Visual Pleasure and Normative Cinema." It is reflected in Hollywood Cinema (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock films) and uses psychoanalysis and Freud's theories with feminist ideas.
• It takes ideas from Freud on "scopophilia," or "taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (p. 806).
• Women's identities are produced and defined through the male gaze. Men are active, and women are passive when compared
• It involves external objectification, fetishization, and voyeurism, thus turning women's bodies into objects.
• Viewer is placed in subject position of heterosexual male, with women being "the bearer of meaning, not the maker".
• Cinema builds the way women are to be looked at, with the look being central to the plot.
• It is called on as an "alternative" avant-garde cinema as a counterpoint, offering new aesthetics and politics.
• There are critiques in that it reinforces the gender binary (active men / passive women).

The Male Gaze: Berger

• Mulvey extended the male gaze idea from John Berger's 1972 "Ways of Seeing".
• Berger focused on historical male gaze and how European art influences portrayals of women in contemporary media.
• Women start to internalize the male gaze, and know they are being watched therefore surveying themselves.
• Men act and women appear.
• Those involved in creating art are typically men, assuming ideal spectator is make.

The Nude

• Women are without clothes for sake of spectator vs being naked.
• Though she does not know the surveyor, she is offering herself for observation.
• Her attention is focused on the spectator, and her stare/ gestures indicate submission to the gaze.

Off Balance

• Jean Kilbourne studied and applied this theory to advertisment.
• Women are looking off balance, and need support, often of the male to stand up straight. Their posture can be crooked with both feet not on the ground
• They are relatively smaller in stature and passive.

Michel Foucault

• Looks into Panopticism, and how the concept is related to 'the gaze'

Objectification

• This can be subverted with "the female gaze" or the "queer gaze".

Gender Performativity

• Judith Butler (1990) explores theory in "Gender Trouble".
• Gender is a repetition of acts and a performance rather than essentialized category and is influenced by culture and society.
• People are formed by constructs of gender but are not fully deterministic.
• Because the categories are constantly shifting, performativity of gender is still important.
• Sex vs Gender is explores (Biological Reality assigned at birth) vs. Gender (Cultural Interpretation)

Poststructuralist Feminists

• It posits that there is no universal truth outside our experience.
• Identity, like gender identity, is created through discourse. It relates to Foucault's thinking on power, knowledge, and discourse.

Gender Performance & Data-Valance

• This is connected to surveillance online and data, with pressure to conform to acceptable visual standards.
• This performance is for the '(male)gaze'.
• This is related to social comparison theory, and abuse online.

Social Comparison Theory

• People evaluate their abilities and attitudes by comparing themselves to others, which shapes their self-image and well-being (APA, 2018.
• The three types of social comparison including comparing oneself to those better off, comparing oneself to those less well-off, and comparing oneself to those who are equal.

Rosalind Gill: Post-Feminism (3rd wave)

• 1990s sentiment indicated feminism is obsolete. Post-feminism embraces the male gaze and capitalism, coining the term "Market Place Feminism”.
• This idea became moot or outmoded to sexualization critiques in women's bodies.
• Women sexuality is emphasized as a form of "empowerment”.
• This is disassociated from social justice or policy change, and privileged/highly individualized, shifting focus from gender equity to individual "girl boss" success.
• It depicts economic stability as a result of self-choice and responsibility.

4th Wave Feminism

• Characterized by reliance on the internet and its diversity of purpose by Ealasaid Munro (2013).
• Trans and queer rights are a major faction with significant representation and hashtag support.
• "Call out" culture targeting, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia is promoted.
• Experiences online in-fighting amongst earlier/younger generations of feminists.