Feminist Criticism
“Feminist scholars concentrate on how biological categories like male and female become conflated* with cultural expectations of gender, resulting in discriminatory social systems that privilege men over women” (p.193)
* Oxford Dictionaries: Conflate: “Combine (two or more texts, ideas, etc.) into one”
Feminist Questions
1. What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy? How are women portrayed? How do these portrayals relate to the gender issues of the period in which the novel was written or is set?
In other words, does the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology? (In the first case, we might say that the text has a patriarchal agenda. In the second case, we might say that the text has a feminist agenda. Texts that seem to both reinforce and undermine patriarchal ideology might be said to be ideologically conflicted) (Tyson, 101).
A Feminist Reading
“Feminist media scholars, in particular, concentrate on revealing the limiting nature of mass media texts that reinforce dominant social understandings of sex and gender” (p. 193)
Feminism in the Media
Terminology
“Although contemporary feminist scholarship is complex in its analysis of the media, the issue of gendered representation and stereotypes is a historically primary focus…” (p. 196)
“The constructed opposition of masculinity and femininity provides a binary understanding of gender in American society, so it is understandable that many gendered stereotypes in the media also function as complementary inverses of each other” (p. 198).
Stereotypical Binaries
Active / Passive
Stereotypical Binaries
Public / Private
Stereotypical Binaries
Reason / Stoicism vs. Emotion / “Hysteria”
Marina Sirtis in Star Trek: The Next Generation (ca. 1990)
Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage (1996)
John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Stereotypical Binaries
Sexual Subject / Sexual Object
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries
Stereotypical Binaries