Feminism and Pop Culture

To get us started:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s2KfecnyIhU

• “Shit Everyone Says to Feminists”

Feminism?

• How do we define it?

• Working to recognize and change oppressive practices

• Especially as those oppressive practices are the result of systemic forms of discrimination

• A keen sense of intersectionality and various forms of privilege

Issues of Representation and Media Constructions of

Gender/Race/Class/Sexuality/ Ability• How do they affect our understanding of

ourselves? Of other people?• How do media forms represent and reinforce

differences?• How might these representations affect the

exploitation and oppression of various people?• How might media representations affect peoples’

understanding of identities and values associated with these identities?

Ideology

• how the dominant institutions in society work through values, conceptions of the world, and symbol systems, in order to legitimize the current order.

• Briefly, this legitimization is managed through the widespread teaching (the social adoption) of ideas about the way things are, how the world 'really' works and should work.

• The media now has become the space in which and through which to define emerging codes of sexual and gender practice.

• It normalizes.

The Mythic Norm

• Audre Lorde – “it is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within society” (“Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”)

• Such power creates social relations that appear to be natural, normal, and beyond reproach.

To start:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lPQZni7I18

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBsEF7Qx09o

• Beyoncé, Destiny’s Child, Pussycat Dolls – think about what is being normalized.

• She has been called out already:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=p72UqyVPj54

Feminism made to seen redundant

• Post-feminism:

• The representation of feminism as being redundant, unnecessary, outdated, or even dangerous

• return of neo-conservative values – in terms of family life, and sexuality for example, veil the power dynamics and politics behind the concept of individual choice and freedom.

• What are the power dynamics involved in choice and freedom?

• Co-existent with this is the process of liberalization (ie gay couples recognized, women can achieve any job)

Power

• It is the code of individualism that is mostly called upon to showcase young, powerful women now – not feminism.

• Ethic of freedom is front and centre – but often media forms will normalize post-feminist anxieties about gender in ways that re-regulate women.

• Ethic of “taking control” particularly has been manifested in popular movies, advertising and public culture

• Although levels of misogyny have not truly diminished in society, some people believe that women have a greater voice in society in part due to the “selling of power” in popular media

Analyze each ad:

• What aspect of feminism is being invoked?• How is it then being

revoked/undermined/shown to be redundant?

• How is power situated in the ad?• Is it a visualization of post-feminism?

“Girl Power”

• Girl power was co-opted by the mainstream and pop culture – put in the service of capitalism… therefore, drained of all of its political power and weight.

Domestication/Incorporation

• “At times, the oppositional culture may grow to be strong enough to actually threaten the dominant culture, and then, ‘to the extent that [these counter-cultural forces] are significant the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate them”

• David Escoffery - How Real is Reality TV: Essays on Representation and Truth

Incorporation:

• Process by which oppositional ideas or practices are brought back into the mainstream.

Fetish of Individualism

• Girl power in postfeminist era – equates the consumption of expensive goods with equality and freedom

Neo-liberalism• The term “neo-liberalism” has also come into wide use in

cultural studies to describe an internationally prevailing ideological paradigm that leads to social, cultural, and political practices and policies that use the language of markets, efficiency, consumer choice, transactional thinking and individual autonomy to shift risk from governments and corporations onto individuals and to extend this kind of market logic into the realm of social relationships

• Ong, Aihwa (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke University Press.

Neo-liberalism

• Free market is organizing principle• Cutting of social programs• Privatization of public works and institutions• Elimination of the concept of public good in

favour of notions of individual responsibility

Judge Judy

• “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining”• “Zero tolerance when it comes to nonsense”

• The media has become a major player in neo-liberalism

• promoting notions of personal choice and success or failure.

• It operates as a public power governing capacities, competencies, and wills of subjects.

Shows like Judge Judy and most Reality TV:

• construct templates for citizenship that complement the privatization of public life, the collapse of the welfare state, and, most important, the discourse of individual choice and personal responsibility.

Judge Judy as self-help guide…

• presumes to solve social problems from crime and poverty to gender inequality by waging a social revolution, not against capitalism, racism, and inequality, but against the order of the self and the way we govern the self.

• The simulated TV courtroom becomes the best place to resolve disputes steeped in the unacknowledged politics of gender, class, and race, but it also classifies those individuals who waste the court’s time as risky deviants and self-made victims who create their own misfortunes by making wrong choices and failing to manage their lives properly.

• How do we see the effects of neo-liberalism around us?

“Race” and “Reality”

From a Reality TV series called “Black. White.”

Jon Kraszewski argues:

• T Real World presents racism as an individual issue of ignorance and ignores the systemic and institutionalized racism that are really the issue.

• (“Country Hicks and Urban Cliques: Mediating Race, Reality, and Liberalism on MTV’s The Real World” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2009)

• “Racism is now embedded in an iniquitous capitalist system, where economic rather than racial laws ensure widespread racial segregation and disadvantage” (209)

• However, white liberalism envisions racism as a problem of individual opinions, not economic structures or various systems of privilege

Whiteness as privilege

• “Whiteness is invisible. White people tend to see themselves as unmarked or unspecified. As such, whiteness largely remains unseen, operating as a position from which a dominant social group can survey and control other races. The very power of whiteness […] stems from its apparent neutrality and ordinariness” (211).

The Real World

• http://www.myspace.com/video/y/real-world-hollywood-brianna-vs-kimberly/32810242

Inferential racism and “nonracist racism”

• these are more dangerous – because they are made to seem unproblematic because they weren’t intended

• Racism simply becomes a problem of intention and knowledge.

ANTM and “blackface”

Social media and greater access to new media tools

• Political activism meets cultural production• Appropriate the tools and media being used

to create dangerous representations in the name of profit, and use them to undermine or subvert the original

• Use humour and wit to showcase privilege and challenge oppression.

• Blogs (feministing, feminist frequency, bitchblog, jammin’ ladies, racialicious, crunk feminist collective)

• Youtube channels (Target Women)• Vlogging• Vidding• Re-mixing• Mash-ups• Social media (twitter, facebook, flickr etc…) – see

Feminist Hulk’s twitter stream, feminist Ryan Gosling.

The meme du jour

• “Shit _________ say to __________”

• Shit white girls say to black girls:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=ylPUzxpIBe0

If we have time

• Pretty woman as horror: http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/2009/10/26/pretty-women-as-a-horror-film/

• Buffy vs. Edward: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwM3GvaTRM