Feminism

Doughty & Etherington-Wright

Feminism: Advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes).

Setting the Scene

• Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley) published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
• Generally considered the first text on Feminism
• 19th century: women campaigning for equal rights and reacting against Victorian image of the “proper role” for women
• Domesticity and patriarchal law
• The term “Feminism” first coined in 1890
• Feminism is often recognized as having four stages, or “waves”

First Wave

• Gained momentum in the early 1900s
• Prominent feminists of the time felt that “women seeking education and alternatives to marriage and motherhood were frowned upon”
• Campaigned for equal property rights, rights to higher education, rights to careers, and rights to vote (Suffragettes)
• Women’s involvement in WWI & WWII
• Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) led to Second Wave Feminism…

Second Wave

• Known as “Women Liberation Movement” or “Women’s Lib”
• 1960s-1980s
• Negative connotations…
• Implied that feminists burned their bras and disliked men
• Informed by political, social, and cultural climate of the time
• Raised awareness regarding patriarchal ideology excluding, silencing, and oppressing women
• “Her-story” rather than just “His-story”
• Encouraged radical reform and revolution
• Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970)
• Fought for equal opportunities in the workplace and an end to sexual discrimination
• Researchers begin researching women’s literature and film

Third Wave

• 1990s-2000s
• Addressed the failures of 2nd Wave
• Focus was too concerned with upper-middle-class white women
• Film theory as a radical act
• Drew on Queer Theory, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Postcolonial Studies, etc.
• New definition of subjectivity
• Intersectionality
• Contraception and abortion issues
• Criticized for lacking a single objective

Fourth Wave

• Post-9/11
• “New Feminism” and/or “Post-Feminism”
• Main motivation was peace-making
• “A fusion of spirituality and social justice that is reminiscent of the American civil rights movement and Ghandi’s call for nonviolent change” (174)
• Women’s bonds across ethnic and religious boundaries
• “New feminine paradigm of power that’s based on tolerance, mutuality, and reverence for nature that have been long identified with women” (174)
• Crucial for curing poverty and war

Post-Feminism

• No agreement for this next development
• “Lipstick feminism”: acceptance of women in traditional and stereotypical roles
• Focus on “difference”, diversity, and anti-essentialism
• Multiple identities promoted and binary categories are dismissed
• Re-emphasis on unequal pay, violence, sexual abuse, and demands on body image
• Wide range of women in today’s society
• “Rather than telling women what they should not do, it encourages success, enjoyment, entitlement, and social mobility” (175)

Post-Feminism Cont…

• Rejects that femininity and feminism are polarized
• May embrace conventional customs like high heels, make-up, being sexy, and being glamorous
• Celebration and endorsement of consumerism and body image
• Moves it from power manipulation to one of positive and powerful engagement that is no longer anti-feminist
• More focus on race, androgyny, and queerness
• More inclusive
• Intersectionality
• Important to recognize marginalized and colonized groups
• Intersects with Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Race and Queer Theories, etc.

Post-Feminism Cont…

• “Feminism” often problematic since it’s associated with radicality, gender binaries, and female membership only
• Tasker and Negra: “The ‘pastness’ of feminism”
• Relationship between culture and politics
• Aims to cover all areas of culture from professional opportunities, freedom of choice in work, domesticity, and parenting to physical and sexual empowerment
• Firmly places Post-feminism as white and middleclass

Rosalind Gill: “Postfeminist Media Culture” (2006)

• Still no agreement on defining postfeminism
• What makes a text “postfeminist”?
• Nine areas regarding Post-Feminist Sensibility
• Femininity as a bodily Property
• Sexualization of Culture
• From sex object to desiring sexual subject
• Individualism, choice and empowerment
• Self surveillance and discipline
• The makeover paradigm
• The reassertion of sexual difference
• Irony and knowingness
• Feminism and Anti-Feminism

The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2015)

Feminist Critical Film Theory

• “Early Feminst studies began to theorize on stereotypical images of female representations in film and the overt focus on the woman’s body” (179)
• Molly Haskel’s From Reverence to Rape (1974): Hollywood’s portrayal of women in conventional roles did not accord with women’s real experiences
• Showed women as socially inferior
• Reduced to sex goddesses, femme fatales, or self-sacraficing mothers (traditional male fantasies)
• The “woman’s film” emerged because women were excluded from most genres
• Women as submissive caricatures

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) & Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)

Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981) & Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992)

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Feminism

• Claire Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973)
• Targeted the processes of film production rather than concentrating on images alone
• Investigates film as semiotic sign system
• How films maintained patriarchal order
• Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
• How cinema works at the level of the unconscious
• Scopophilia: Pleasure in looking. People viewed as erotic objects
• Voyeurism: “Pleasure if voyeuristic when it is dependent on the object of the gaze being unaware”
• Fetishism: when an object becomes the focus of sexual desire
• Narcissism: erotic pleasure derived from looking at one’s own body

Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)

• “The male gaze”
• Spectator is assumed to be male
• Female objectification
• Unconscious patriarchal society has structured film form
• Lacan’s Mirror Stage
• Female subject is passive whereas the male subject is active
• Female connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness”
• Erotic objects for characters on screen as well as for spectators in theater
• Three looks of the cinema
• Article criticized
• Essentialist and reductive
• Overlooked areas of women’s voices, race, and sexual preferences
• Female spectators often identify with both the passive and active roles

Todd McGowan: The Real Gaze (2007)

• The gaze is located within the filmic image, not from the spectator
• Takes Lacanian film theory away from the Imaginary and places it within the Real
• Believes that “the focus on the relationship between spectator and screen (Metz and Baudry) has ignored the relationship between the spectator and the Real” (183)
• Spectators directly implicated in what they see
• Challenge the viewers’ power

Mary Ann Doane: “Film and the Masquerade” (1981)

• The female gaze in relation to masquerade
• “Masquerade” to describe “the way women often adopt a metaphorical mask; a way of behaving that is inscribed by gender expectations” (183)
• Common strategy for women is to act excessively flirtatious
• Male spectator is destined to be a fetishist where as the female spectator finds it nearly impossible to take that position
• Rather than absorbing the image, she is absorbed by it
• She lacks the distance that voyeurism dictates
• Crucial to understand the woman’s position since most theorists see the female gaze as repressed

Horror and the Feminine

• Masochism: “any passive attitude towards sexual life and the sexual object [...] in which satisfaction is conditional upon suffering physical or mental pain at the hands of the sexual object” (184)
• Abjection: “the place where meaning collapses. It is where we cannot explain what we see” (184)
• Different from uncanniness (more violent)
• Does not respect borders, positions, rules.
• The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite…

Barbara Creed: “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine” (1989)

• Horror as a perverse pleasure
• Using Freud’s fetishism, Campbell’s primitive mythology, and Kristeva’s abjection
• Allows abjection to be encountered in the safety of the cinema
• The monstrous threatens to cross borders and threatens stability
• Maternal figure as abject
• Refuse to let go of their children, allowing them entry into society
• Excrement and menstrual blood as abject
• Castration anxiety
• Religion once used to purify the abject, but now we rely on art
• Vagina dentata
• Symbol of male castration anxiety

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) & Carrie (de Palma, 1976)

Teeth (Lichtenstein, 2008) & Jennifer’s Body (Kusama, 2009)

“Mulvey, Doane, and Creed’s work on the gaze, spectatorship, and the monstrous-feminine utilizes Psychoanalytic theories to examine how the female spectator is constructed by the text. Yet there are other approaches that require attention, such as questions of audience response” (186)

Annette Kuhn: “Women’s Genres” (1984)

• Concerned with the “woman in the audience”
• Examines soap operas and melodramas
• Three problems she addresses:
• Gendered spectatorship, historical specificity of gendered spectatorship, and the relationship between film and television texts
• Problems arose because psychoanalytic theories don’t account for cultural or historical specificity
• How do large audiences of women identify with popular media texts?
• Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956) (58:55)

Teresa de Lauretis: “Alice Doesn’t. Feminism. Semiotics. Cinema” (1984)

• Structural representations of “woman”
• How narratives produce images of subjectivity
• Narrative structures (formed by desire) is inherently Oedipal (men’s control of women)
• Two processes of identification:
• First moves between masculine/active identification (Scottie in Vertigo) and a feminine/passive identification (Judy/Madeleine in Vertigo). Enables female spectators to take up both active and passive positions of desire
• Second is simultaneous identification
• Feminist theory built on the contradiction of the unrepresentability of woman as subject of desire

Feminist Approaches to Marginalized Groups

• Jackie Stacey: “Desperately Seeking Difference” (1987)
• Homosexual spectatorship and desire and why they’ve been largely neglected
• Texts can be read and enjoyed from different gendered positions
• bell hooks: “The Oppositional Gaze” (1992)
• Black people historically punished for looking
• Feminist theory largely ignores issues of race in a similar way that the film industry struggled to represent black womanhood
• Often objectified, even by black filmmakers
• Black women either identify with the white woman on screen or resist identification
• As a result, black women adopt “oppositional gaze”
• “Black femininity is still victim to ‘the white supremacist capitalist imperialist dominating “gaze”’”

Alternative Approaches

• Most feminist critics followed Mulvey’s lead, yet there are other approaches
• Kaja Silverman: “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice” (1984)
• sound/image relationship in terms of gender
• Noticeable absence of a female voice-over
• Female subject “associated with unreliable, thwarted, or acquiescent speech” (188)
• Feminist theories and pornography
• Feminists divided on this issue
• Misogynist, dehumanizing, and encouraging violence vs anti-censorship, complex fantasies/fetishism, and potential for female pleasure

Feminism and the Film Industry

• Jennifer Lawrence and her discovery of unequal pay on American Hustle (Russell, 2013)
• Director Maria Giese met with American Civil Liberties Union and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to discuss gender discrimination in Hollywood
• Geena Davis and her “Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media”
• “Engage, educate, and influence the need to dramatically improve gender balance, reduce stereotyping, and create diverse female characters in entertainment targeting children 11 and under”

Alison Bechdel

• Cartoonist and author known for her long-running lesbian comic Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008)
• Bechdel Test (originally coming from an issue of the comic)
• Female presence in a film
• Three Requirements to pass the test
• The film has to have at least two women in it
• The women have to talk to each other
• They have to talk to each other about something besides a man
• Originally intended as a tongue-in-cheek joke, it’s been implemented as a simple way to reveal the industry’s systematic marginalization of women in film