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Transcript

Wolf: "The Beauty Myth"

The 'economics' and repressive function of 'Beauty'

Wolf argues that Beauty has two functions:

the social function - 'Beauty' acts to 'discipline' women into certain kinds of competitive conformity (of appearance, etc) and anxiety (i.e. body-image).

the 'economic' function - 'beauty' is a commodity. It is bought & sold and any woman who conforms to the standards of 'beauty' embodies a certain appearance capital.

McRobbie: 'Jackie Girl' , discursive changes, & the critique of 'post-feminism' 

In her important early paper on the magaznine for teenage girls Jackie McRobbie outlines the brutally isolating individualism that the discourses of the magazine 'endow with importance'. McRobbie shows that the reader of the magazine - 'the Jackie girl - is worked on by the ideological system of the magazine so as to reject female companionship, to strive only to acquire a boy friend (rejecting other avenues in life), to submit to a regime of 'beauty', and to face the world alone.

In this article McRobbie deals with the so-called 'post-feminism' that began to appear in the 1990's. This was supposed to be a mark of female success in society; women no longer needed a feminist politics becuase they had achieved sufficent equality that feminism was no longer useful and, indeed, could now be holding them back.

McRobbie was concerned to work through the ideological aspects of this discourse and shows quite clearly that 'post-feminism' is just no-feminism. The dicourse of 'choice' that post-feminism projected allows exploitative modes of behaviour to re-appear in women's lives only now cloaked in the language of choice - if it is women's choice to participate in the porn-industries or conform to the appearence dictates of a fiath then how can we criticise that individual choice? [the charge that it is not an individual choice will be dismised by the historical quality of feminist politics]. The high social value of 'individual choice' in the discourses of our world is just reflected and projected by post-feminism.

Radway: The Ethnography of the Female Audience

Radway argues for a enthnographic approach to the analysis of women's reception of media and media texts. Insisting that only by studying the actual media practices of an audience can we begin to understand what meaning they take from any media or media text and, therefore, what the relations of discourse and power are bewteen media, text, and audience.

Gauntlett: Role Models, Self-Help, Discourses, and Modes of Femininity

Gauntlett uses several ideas on the discursive construction of the self (such as Foucault's 'technologies of the self') to suggest that 'role-models', celebrities, self-help discourses, amd the discourses or representation found in the media provide a 'tool-kit' for the construction of individual indentity; 'directions for living' in his terms.

The discourses of Gender in the Media are, therefore, not a quesion of dominance and submission but of reception and adaptation. This does not means that power does not play a role in this and it is quite possible that an abundence of certain types of discourses (such as the 'choice' discourse McRobbie criticised) generate a range of 'negative' relations between people. Gauntlett, therefore, though his use of Focuault, moves us towards QUEER THEORY, which will be our next topic.

Simone De Beauvoir: Women as Other

In her 'The Second Sex' De Beauvoir argued that women was constructed as 'the other';

“One is not born but becomes a woman”

"But the very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the justifications that men have ever been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s interest."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/#SecSexWomOth

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

Media, Gender & Identity: An Introduction (2nd edition 2008).

"These identities are not 'copied' in any big or direct sense but they feed into our on going calculations about how about how we see life and where we would like to fit into society. As we construct our narratives of the self we are able to appropriate (borrow) the positive bits of other people's attitudes or lives that we fancy for ourselves."

Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context Author(s), Feminist Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 53-78

“Clearly, the reader-theory emphasis on the constitutive power and activity of the reader suggests, indeed almost demands, that the cultural critic who is interested in the "meaning"of a form and the causes of its popularity consider first whether she is a member of a different interpretive community than the readers who are her ostensible subjects. If she is, she may well produce and evaluate textual meaning in a manner fundamentally different from those whose behaviour she seeks to explain. None of the early students of the romance have so foregrounded their own interpretive activities. Because of their resulting assumption of an identity between their own reading and that of regular romance readers, they have severed the form from the women who actually construct its meaning from within a particular context and on the basis of a specific constellation of attitudes and beliefs. This assumption has resulted, finally, in an incomplete account of the particular ideological power of this literary form, in that these critic shave not successfully isolated the particular function performed through the act of romance reading which is crucially important to the readers themselves. In ignoring certain specific aspects of the romance readers' daily context, they have also failed to see how the women's selection and construction of their favourite novels addresses the problems and desires they deem to be characteristic of their lives.”

“When romances are used to deny temporarily the demands of a family, when they are understood as the signs of a woman's ability to do something for herself alone, when they are valued because they provide her with the opportunity to indulge in positive feelings about a heroine and women in general, then their popularity ought to be seen as evidence of an unvoiced protest that important needs are not being properly met. It is the act or event of romance reading that permits the Smithton woman to reject those extremely taxing duties and expectations she normally shoulders with equanimity. In picking up her book, she asserts her independence from her role, affirms that she has a right to be self-interested for a while, and declares that she deserves pleasure as much as anyone else.To be sure, this kind of defiance is relatively mild, because the woman need not pit herself against her husband and family over the crucial issues of food preparation,childcare, financial decisions, and so on. But for women who have lived their lives quiescently believing that female self-interest is exactly coterminous with the interest of a husband and children, the ability to reserve time for the self, even if it is to read a romance,is a significant and positive step away from the institutional prison that demands denial and sublimation of female identity.”

FEMINIST MEDIA THEORY

Mulvey: 'The Male Gaze"

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" - Laura Mulvey -

Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

The patriarchic construction of representations of women in media.

"The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man"

"This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself."

Mulvey's argument posits the 'image-of' women in, especially video, media as 'for' a male audience and a spectating gaze that is 'taken-as' being a male view. Images are composed as though they were to be view by a male audience regardless of the actual composition of the audience.

Media as Systems of Gender Ideology

'Jackie Girl' and the ideological systems of the media

'Post-Feminism' and the ideological system of the media

POST-FEMINISM AND POPULAR CULTURE, Feminist Media Studies Vol. 4, No. 3, 2004

Jackie magazine: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl

[http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/jackie-magazine.pdf]

"Feminism has intervened to constrain these kinds of conventional desires. It is then, a relief to escape this censorious politics and freely enjoy that which has been disapproved of. Thus feminism is invoked in order that it is relegated to the past."

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf, 1991

“The work of this branch of the media involves framing the world for its readers, and through a variety of techniques endowing with importance those topics chosen for inclusion”

"These are hardly rabid anti-feminist tracts. But relations of power are indeed made and re-made within texts of enjoyment and rituals of relaxation and abandonment. These young women’s genres are vital to the construction of a new “gender regime,” based on the double entanglement which I have described; they endorse wholeheartedly what Rose calls “this ethic of freedom,” and young women have come to the fore as the pre-eminent subjects of this new ethic. These popular texts normalise post-feminist gender anxieties so as to re-regulate young women by means of the language of personal choice. But even “well regulated liberty” can backfire (the source of comic effect), and this in turn gives rise to demarcated pathologies (leaving it too late to have a baby, failing to find a good catch, etc.) which carefully define the parameters of what constitutes liveable lives for young women without the occasion of re-invented feminism."

"Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the face of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to those formulaic and endlessly reproduced “beautiful” images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel worthless was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The corporate economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a “higher calling”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels,” has been forced upon us by popular sociology, by magazines and by fiction to disguise the fact that women in the role of the consumer has been essential to the development of our own industrial society….behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed in to a social virtue”. As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women."

CHANGES IN THE DISCOURSES OF YOUNG WOMENS IDENTITY

McRobbie, soundings issue 5 Spring 1997 Pecs and penises: the meaning of girlie culture

“the deeper change in consciousness which has affected the outlook, values and expectations of women and young women, from different social backgrounds, from different parts of the country, from different cultures. It is difficult to generalise across such a large sector of the population. It is not as though women share anything like a single set of values or beliefs. Nor has change affected women homogeneously. By exploring the climate of change in the culture of young women today one is tapping into something which exists in a state of disaggregated latency, a 'semi-structure of feeling', to re-phrase Raymond Williams, which surfaces at unexpected moments in unexpected ways. But its presence is a sure sign that there has been some deep and apparently irreversible shift across the whole social domain.”

“In short, social and cultural change have moved further and faster than [we] are willing to admit. We now have to run to catch up. The danger for feminism is that it remains unwilling to recognise that there are now many ways of being a woman or girl in contemporary society.”

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