Gender and Media Part 1 Notes

Gender and Media - Part 1

Films and Gender

  • Do films construct gender or reflect existing gender roles?

Early Feminist Critiques

  • Focused on stereotypes of women and their negative impact on female spectators.
  • Advocated for corrective, positive images of women in film.

Structural Theory and Psychoanalysis

  • Claire Johnston (early 1970s):
    • Drew on psychoanalysis to suggest cinema provides a male myth of "woman."
    • Woman in classical cinema serves as an "empty sign" exchanged by men; the object rather than the subject of desire.
    • Critical of Hollywood cinema but saw it as important for study and intervention.
    • Called for an alternative narrative cinema.

Theoretical Frameworks

  • Semiotics: Theory of signs; a tool for analyzing how meaning is produced through language and ideology.
  • Psychoanalytic Theory: A theory of the subject as constituted through sexual difference.
  • These frameworks provide ways to understand how the viewer participates in the meaning of the film.

Laura Mulvey

  • Film theorist, media scholar, filmmaker.
  • "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975).
  • Sustained dialogue on how sexual difference is reproduced in classical cinema (30s, 40s, 50s).
  • Argues women have been placed in a specific, powerless position in cinema.
  • Asks how the cinematic system actively and passively makes this so.

Mulvey's Key Example

  • Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).
  • Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980): The “Master of Suspense,” known for Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).

Representation of Women

  • Cinema reproduces gendered subjects.
    • Men = active.
    • Women = passive.
  • The spectator is positioned through identification with characters.
  • Camera positioning, lighting, and roles set up positions: the viewer is meant to see themselves as the one looking, not being looked at.

Voyeurism/Scopophilia

  • Literally, the love of looking.
  • Refers to the predominantly male gaze of Hollywood cinema, which enjoys objectifying women into mere objects to be looked at, rather than subjects with their own voice.
  • Influenced by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The Male Gaze

  • The “gaze” describes how viewers engage with visual media.
  • Originating in film theory and criticism in the 1970s, it refers to how we look at visual media.
  • Mulvey argued that traditional Hollywood films respond to “scopophilia”: the sexual pleasure involved in looking.
  • Mulvey’s concept is accurately described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze.
  • Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tend to sexualize women for a male viewer.
  • Woman is “spectacle,” and man is “the bearer of the look”.

Example of the Male Gaze

  • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) introduces Cora Smith through close-ups that force the viewer to stare at her body, creating a sexual, voyeuristic mode of looking associated with the male protagonist’s point-of-view.

Psychoanalytic Theory and Spectatorship

  • It's about the mechanisms of viewing, not psychoanalyzing characters.
  • More than the act of looking, the gaze is a viewing relationship characteristic of social circumstances.
  • Psychoanalysis + semiotics = understanding film.
  • Analysis does not always have to be tied to economy or class.

Freud's Psychoanalysis

  • Conscious / Pre-Conscious / Unconscious
  • Repression
  • Id / Ego / Superego
  • Interrelation of Individual/Society/Biology

Feminist Interpretation of Freud

  • Feminist theorists present Freud’s model of the unconscious and sexuality as an accurate description of the place of women in phallocentric culture.
  • This is seen as specific to contemporary society, not a necessary or natural condition.
  • The unconscious shapes cinematic practices.
  • Male pleasure, dominant pleasure.
  • Male ambivalence toward the female figure leads to extreme positions: to devalue, punish, or save her, or to make her a pedestal figure or fetish.

Three Looks in Cinema

  • The characters in the film look at each other.
  • The viewer looks at the screen.
  • The camera looks at the event being filmed.
  • Mulvey aims to disrupt pleasure.

A Feminist Counter-Cinema

  • Mulvey advocates for an alternative cinema that doesn’t adhere to narrative representational conventions.
  • Feminist filmmaking must deconstruct and destroy the gaze.
  • Destroy satisfaction, pleasure, and privilege.
  • Employs techniques of distanciation (limiting identification).
  • The gaze is masculine within patriarchal logic.

The Gaze and Patriarchy

  • The gaze is not essentially male, but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the "masculine" position.
  • The gaze is masculine within the terms of patriarchal culture.

Theoretical Basis for Critique

  • Based on Cultivation Hypothesis.
  • Repeated exposure to stereotypes of women may ‘condition’ a world view where:
    • Women are subordinate.
    • Women are defined by sexual display.
    • Women are sexually available.
  • Reinforcing patriarchal social values (hegemonic/dominant cultural power).

Effects Studies

  • Tannis McBeth Williams:
    • Experimental study, introduction of TV to a Northern Canadian Community.
    • Found children’s play exhibited more sex-role stereotyped behaviors after the introduction of TV.
    • Perceptions became more traditional.
    • Judged stories on the basis of what they look like rather than what they do.

Stereotypical Representation

  • Stereotype: A reduction of persons to a set of exaggerated, usually negative, character traits.
  • How measured:
    • ‘content analysis’
    • Textual analysis: roles
    • Madonna/whore dichotomy
    • Other common stereotypes (Meehan):
      • Matriarch, goodwife, witch, bitch, decoy, victim, courtesan, siren, or temptress.

Objectification

  • The separation of a person from their identity/personality.
  • Reducing the focus from the whole person to the level of a body part, or a function (often sexual in nature).

bell hooks on Objectification

  • Our unique intersection of identities often results in unique objectifications of us in media representations.

Gender in Science Fiction

  • Gender within the genre tends to reflect the dominating ideas about gender within a particular culture.
  • Even in its visions of the future/alternate realities.

Metropolis (1927)

  • One of the first sci-fi representations of femininity.
  • Represented through an android the ideas that women were the weaker and more delicate sex, maternal, respectful wives.
  • Creation of a female android.
  • Meets idealistic standards of feminine beauty.
  • Women who use sexuality to gain power or entice men to do bad things is a long existing trope. Since her character has power over the men below using her sexuality its automatically assumed that she isn’t to be trusted.

Patriarchy and Gender Representation

  • Makes sense that we might see sexist representations of gender in film since, to this day, the film industry leaders are primarily men.
  • Even particular moments in changing gender roles historically have shaped and shifted science fiction portrayals.

World War II

  • Created a scenario where many women started to work outside of the home or joined combat forces in various roles.
  • Returning WW2 soldiers found a country full of women who were self-reliant and wanted to earn their own income/independence.
  • As a result, science-fiction of the 1950s and 60’s started to heavily portray female characters as damsels in distress that needed saving by men.

Censorship and Objectification

  • The 1960s saw the end of extreme censorship in Hollywood and as a result, new opportunities to objectify women.
  • The male gaze becomes very present in sci-fi from this era onward and women/androids/aliens are often portrayed through this lens. (Barbarella 1968)

Shift in Representation

  • Over the decades there starts to be a shift with fewer objectifying portrayals of women in Sci-Fi and a more critical representation of them in film.

The Gaze in Sci-Fi

  • While more egalitarian models of personality and behavior are presented there is still often the male gaze present even within films from this genre (Princess Leia’s gold bikini)(Ripley in Alien getting into her tiny underwear and tank top to get into cryo sleep).

Gender Representation in Modern Sci-Fi

  • Even in a modern era where we’ve worked through this initial representations in sci-fi there is still an overwhelming portrayal of people in the future/other planets and realities that exist as heterosexual traditionally gendered individuals.

Veronica Hollinger

  • “All too often, heteronormativity is embedded in both theory and fiction as \"natural\" and \"universal,\" a kind of barely glimpsed default gender setting which remains unquestioned and untheorized."
  • Science fiction would seem to be ideally suited, as a narrative mode, to the construction of imaginative challenges to the smoothly oiled technologies of heteronormativity, especially when/as these almost invisible technologies are pressed into the service of a coercive regime of compulsory heterosexuality.
  • However, in spite of science fiction’s function as a literature of cognitive estrangement, and in spite of the work of both feminist writers and critics in their on-going efforts to re-think the problematics of gender—especially gender’s impact on the lives of women—heterosexuality as an institutionalized nexus of human activity remains stubbornly resistant to defamiliarization.
  • On the whole, science fiction is an overwhelmingly straight discourse, not least because of the covert yet almost completely totalizing ideological hold heterosexuality has on our culture’s ability to imagine itself otherwise.
  • Both science fiction as a narrative field and feminism as a political and theoretical field work themselves out, for the most part, within the terms of an almost completely naturalized heterosexual binary. As Michael Warner puts it, "Het culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of inter-gender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn’t exist" (xxi).”.

Stableford - Sociology of Science Fiction

  • Describes three communicative purposes to science fiction:
    • Directive – conveys info with the goal of changing attitude
    • Maintenance – reinforces and legitimizes audiences existing views
    • Restorative – functions as a form of escapism
  • While science fiction could have the potential to be directive and drastically change attitudes about our current lives, it instead is found to have a lot of maintenance and restoration.
  • What purposes does this serve for the creators of science fiction?
  • Who benefits from changing attitudes around gender?

Jim Endersby - Are women human?

Mary Wollstonecraft

  • Stated in A Vindication of the Rights of Women that boys and girls are at the mercy of their passions and need guidance.
  • But only boys were guided to become independent thinkers. Women were guided to become pleasers and to lift their position in life through marriage
  • Women were "subject to prejudices that brutalize them" in order "to sweeten the cup of man"

Mary Shelley

  • Daughter of Wollstonecraft. Wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and continued her mother’s exploration of the ideas of who deserves recognition and respect as a human
  • Frankenstein is considered by many to be the first Science Fiction novel and at the very least helped to define what Science Fiction became as a genre.
  • Has its roots in questions of gender and humanity

Mary and Mary

  • One asked questions about what the world would be like if women were treated as independent thinkers and humans
  • One thought about artificial life and how we might respond to it or respect it, creating a whole new genre of questions

Tomorrow’s Eve (1886) - Villiers de L’Isle -Adam

  • Science Fiction that creates a fictional account of Thomas Edison creating a female android.
  • Based off Edison creating his “phonographic dolls”
  • The android had phonographic cylinders made of gold because it would “yield a more feminine resonance”
  • The Edison character eventually claims that all women are already artificial constructions, so why not have an actual android which would be superior to a woman.
  • Future science fiction like The Stepford Wives played off similar themes around gender, while also playing off male fears of the 1970s that women were becoming equals and not caretakers/objects of pleasure
  • Edison explains that, once he’s done his work: “the present gorgeous little fool will no longer be a woman, but an angel; no longer a mistress but a lover; no longer reality, but the IDEAL!”.

“No Woman Born” (1944)

  • Deirdre, a famous dancer/singer almost dies in a fire, but has her brain saved and a new metal body is created for her by a scientist.
  • New body was described by scientist as faceless, graceful, sleek and metallic. Claimed that she lost everything that made her a woman or human
  • Deirdre challenges this view of her humanity and replies:
    • “The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a … a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated. “I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face”.

Endersby

  • Claims that this old and essential question in science fiction, whether or not a woman is a human is a much more complex answer than “yes”
  • The genre forces us to think about how society defines both gender and humans.

Social Media and Gender

  • Social Media is not a neutral/empty space
  • Our profiles are not created in a vacuum devoid of gender
  • We bring our culture into social media, and social media represents cultural norms back at us

Bivens (2016)

  • Perceptions of what posts new users want to see are based on gender and change what is displayed for new users on the platform
  • Many had custom options based on your gender
  • Posed as new users and signed up for platforms to see differences
  • Research team conducted an analysis of social media platforms

Burgess et al (2016)

  • Social media is used to make digital cultures of gender and sexuality
  • While social media presents rigid gender binaries and expectations in its programming..
  • Users also enact gender online through how we use the service and what we post about the self

Gender visibility in social media

  • Nillizadeh et al (2016)
  • Systems like sexism still operate in social media
  • On Twitter after studying 94,000 users it was shown that perceived gender impacts how often twitter users were followed, assigned to lists, and retweeted
  • For users in lower quartiles of visibility because perceived as female is associated with more visibility
  • Tendency flips among the most visible users on the platform, where being perceived as male is strongly associated with more visibility

Social Media - Visuals

  • What do we post of ourselves?
  • How is gender visually represented on social media?

Rose et al (2012)

  • On Facebook traits emerge more strongly in pictures of men to show them as active, dominant, and independent
  • For women prominent traits displayed are ones that show them as attractive and dependant

Zheng et al (2016)

  • For Chinese users of social media men were more likely to have profile pictures showing themselves having fun
  • Women were more likely to express something emotional with their image

Herring (2015)

  • Women are more likely to limit visibility of their profiles
  • Men are more likely to include false information in their profiles
  • Profile images tend to reflect sexualized and gendered media norms
  • Linguistically on social media men tend to make choices that reflect assertiveness
  • Girls linguistically make choices that aim to please men and facilitate social interaction

Butkowski et al (2020)

  • Young women replicate normative feminine cues popularized through mass media in selfies
  • Typically include Goffman’s categories
  • Exaggerated gender displays on social media tend to garner more feedback and likes

Lokithasan et al (2019)

  • In terms of social media influencers women tend to promote beauty products
  • Men tend to promote technology and gaming products

Social Media as a Gendered Political Space

  • Politics of course thrive on social media
  • While discussions are often about liberal/conservative they can also be had in terms of gender and politics

Bode (2015)

  • Differences tend to be seen among the most visible political behaviors for gender
  • Women engage in less visible or less-likely-to-offend political behaviors as compared to men
  • As a result men tend to participate more in politics on social media than women

Koc-Michalska et al (2021)

  • Caution should be exercised when using digital trace data to try and represent public opinion as a result
  • The possibility of being mansplained to affects who is willing to post their opinions online
  • Men report being more likely to be accused on mansplaining on twitter
  • Women are more likely to be “mansplained” to on social media, especially twitter
  • Twitter has a more pronounced gender gap in political posting than Facebook does

Turel (2024)

  • Men overall more likely to share fake news, and to be politically polarized
  • Being more partisan also predicts sharing of fake news
  • Heterophily in networks (entering in diverse online spaces and groups) decreases the likelihood
  • Women were slightly less likely to be in groups online with high heterophily (but often to avoid impacts of sexism)

Politics – Gender & Race

  • Dixon (2017) and many others have shown that racism and sexism both are alive and well on social media, impacting users in a variety of ways.
  • While many online platforms are seen as masculine spaces, they are specifically seen as White masculine spaces in which casual explicit and implicit racism flow freely in posts, online communication, follower counts, and visibility

Kishonna Gray – Black Cyberfeminism

  • In digital environments like video games there are inaccurate portrayals of race, and a steady ignorance of how racism is built into game design among developers
  • As a result many minority groups in terms of race and sexuality seek online communities in social media and video gaming that are separate from the mainstream social connections. (like using private parties or chats in games, private groups in social media, etc.)

Jenzen (2017)

  • Trans youth nowadays have grown up with social media
  • Rampant transphobia exists online (more so now than in the early 2010s)
  • In response trans youth respond both critically and creatively in their use of social media
  • Consume a far more diverse spread of social media than past research recognizes
  • Create content for their own community in the absence of materials provided by others
  • Representations of the self are more than just simple representations, more about being in and taking up space, challenging binary expectations, providing role models and examples for other trans folks

Social media and its ability to support

  • Hiebert and Kortes- Miller (2021)
  • Showed that during the pandemic and lockdowns Tik Tok was used as a supportive community for gender and sexual minority youth
  • As a place to form their identity
  • To find community and belonging, and support

Social Media and Negative Impacts on the self

  • A gendered process
  • Research has been primarily interested in how social media creates negative impacts, and how it is different based on gender

Nesi and Prinstein (2018)

  • Have shown that among adolescents popularity and gender served as moderators for who was more likely to engage in social comparison and feedback- seeking online, both of which are related to depression
  • Those with low popularity were more likely, but also just girls in general were more likely

Svensson et al (2022)

  • Social media use tends to only be related to internalization for girls, particularly as it related to online chatting and self-presentation

Su et al (2020)

  • In terms of addictive or compulsive behaviors with online social interaction:
  • Women were more likely to develop social media addiction
  • Men more likely to develop internet gaming disorders (particularly with online/social games)

Twenge and Martin (2019)

  • A review of multiple large studies on adolescents and social media use reveals a few things:
    • Girls spend more time on social media in general than boys
    • Boys spend more time gaming, and on electronic devices in general
    • Associations between moderate/heavy digital media use and low psychological well-being were larger for girls than for boys
    • Light users of digital media were slightly higher in well-being than non-users
    • Heavy users of digital media across the board twice as likely as low users to be low in well-being or have mental health issues