Feminist criticism has undergone a number of shifts as applied to media texts. It initially focused on the patriarchic nature of media texts, both in terms of the fact that males were not only the dominant producers of such texts, but most of the main characters with power were male. Feminist critics also noted the ways in which audiences were invited to adopt a “male gaze” stance (Mulvey, 1989) that positioned viewers to perceive females as objects of masculine desire. For example, Jean Kilbourne, (1999) in her Killing Us Softly series, and in Slim Hopes, demonstrates how advertising creates gender images that sexualize adolescent females and define norms for body weight associated with the beauty industry.

And, in his documentary, Dreamworlds II, Sut Jhally demonstrates how MTV music videos portray women as sex objects within the context of an adolescent male fantasy world.

As questions arose from poststructuralist feminists about the “essentialist” binary oppositions of males versus females, feminist critics, as well as queer studies, focused more on the gendered nature of certain social practices associated with power, as well as the gendered nature of media genres and social contexts such as sports games or the Internet as highly masculine sites.

A leading theorists who challenges these essentialist gender notions is Judith Butler. In her book, Gender Trouble, she argues that gender should be perceived a an historical or cultural set of performances that are continually changing to adopt to different contexts.

Judith Butler’s theories on gender

Module on Judith Butler’s theories

Mary Klages: summary of Gender Trouble

In a student essay, Sally Young, describes Butler’s position on performance applied to popular culture:

Butler concludes that our gender is not a core aspect of our identity but rather a performance, how we behave at different times. Our gender (masculinity and femininity) is an achievement rather than a biological factor. To illustrate this point Butler refers to the Aretha Franklin song, You make me feel like a natural woman. In this song, Franklin can sing, “You make me feel like a woman” without this being presumed necessarily obvious. In other words, a woman does not necessarily feel feminine all the time, any more than a man feels masculine. Butler suggests that we should think of gender as free-floating and fluid rather than fixed:

“When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”
(Butler, 1990, p.6)

Butler advocates “gender trouble” as a way of challenging traditional notions of gender identities. Butler’s main metaphor for this is drag. By dressing up as a member of the opposite sex, drag artists are subverting ideas of gender norms, challenging the “constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity” (Butler, 1990, p. 148). Although Butler does not offer any other concrete examples of how people might go about subverting gender roles, Madonna is often used as an illustration of someone who does not keep to traditional gender roles. In the video of her song, Justify My Love, for example, there are several characters who are dressed and behave in ways which make their sex and gender indeterminable. During her Blonde Ambition tour, Madonna openly defied traditional feminine roles by performing in a sexually dominant and confident way:

“She is not so constrained by the gender boundaries that control most of her audience . . . She is able to use her power as a star to articulate the sexualities and fantasies that other women would be condemned for.” (Skeggs, 1993, p. 67)

Butler’s argument that gender performances are continually changing given historical and cultural forces is evident in the emergence of the “men’s magazine” that celebrates traditional performances of masculinity and femininity. Lucy Brown in an essay, “Are magazines for young men likely to reinforce stereotypical, ‘macho’ and sexist attitudes in their readers?” argues that in the current culture, that challenges facing masculinity leads to backlash adoption of traditional masculine roles in ways that exclude the emotional “soft” side of males.

Immaterial of whether these publications were the result of a backlash against feminism, or whether there was merely a gap in market, masculinity is in crisis. Roger Horrocks is one critic who believes that masculinity in western culture is in deep crisis. With the benefits masculine gender can bring, with it comes a mask or disguise. The emphasis on male dominance in public areas of life has tended to obscure the emotional poverty of many men's lives.[9] Magazines tend to reflect this in that they portray only one side of masculinity, leaving out the emotional bit, and concentrating on the outward display of masculinity. Here one can see that the stereotyping of men within these magazines as macho male and ignoring the stereotypical 'emotional male' or even 'soft lad', can lead to problems and criticisms. Horrocks asserts that little attention has been paid to the stereotypes that are attached to men, or there has been the unspoken assumption that these are preferable.[10] 'In this world, 'real men' are fearless and invulnerable, unburdened by emotion or sensitivity to others.'[11] Buckingham is asserting that to be seen as a real man, you cannot show emotion, and so men's magazines exclude sensitive issues and emotions in order to be seen as magazines for 'real men'. In discussing the release of a new magazine 'Deluxe' in an article for the media guardian, John Dugdale writes 'even though banning babes sacrifices the one sure-fire sales-boosting device in today's men's market, not least by reducing horny schoolboy appeal. Are there really 150,000 soft lads out there.'[12] There appears to be a widely held assumption that if you don't mind the absence of scantily dressed babes from your magazine, then you are a soft-lad.

'What is obviously missing from this celebration of one-night stands, obsessive consumerism and male bonding is how men's needs for reciprocity and emotional warmth are to be met.'[13] (Stevenson et al, 2000)

In an excerpt from a book by David Gauntlett Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, New York, Blackwell Press, interviews Kirsten Pullen about the role of magazines in constructing gender.

KP: One of the things I like about your work and that this book seems to do well is to recognize and interrogate the ambivalence of some of the new ways of talking about gender in the media -- Maxim and other men's magazines are both about an assertive masculinity and about a vulnerability and concern with image traditionally associated with women's magazines. My question, then, is what tools do you bring to bear, both in your writing and in your classes, to go beyond an initial 'yay, pop culture!' or 'ugh, pop culture!' response?

DG: Oh that's a good question. It's not really satisfactory to have an essay that goes, 'Are women's magazines a good thing or a bad thing?', and then they debate the pros and cons and decide that they are mostly bad (or good) but with some good (or bad) aspects. As you suggest, that doesn't get us very far. To understand these questions better I think we need to look at what the appeal of the magazine (or whatever other piece of popular culture) is -- in other words, why is it popular? -- and then look at what meanings that thing might have for an individual and how it might, in any small or subtle way, have an influence on a person's sense of identity.

So I'm always on the lookout for any theorist that might give us useful tools for thinking about that. In Media, Gender and Identity I aim to show how people can make use of the work of Anthony Giddens (on how media products can be used as part of the construction of a 'lifestyle' and a 'narrative of the self'); and Michel Foucault (on how media may contribute to the cultivation of the self, and also lead people to monitor and police themselves and their projected identities); and Judith Butler (on the fluidity of identities); amongst others.

KP: You seem to suggest that 'popular feminism' has allowed many young men and women to shift some of their ideas about gender roles -- the 'radio-friendly remix' has disseminated feminism to a wider audience. While I think this is certainly true and even positive, I wonder if there isn't a danger here. Many of my students and colleagues (of all ages and genders) assume that the 'women's lib' battles have been fought and won -- after all, Ally McBeal is a serious lawyer despite her gender and her short skirts. For someone who is always aware that it's more complicated than that (my favorite phrase), I worry that 'popular feminism' masks more ambivalence about gender roles than its widespread acceptance suggests. Any thoughts?

DG: There's certainly a problem that people think debates about gender are over with now, and that feminism has come, and done its thing, and that's that. I think it's interesting that Angela McRobbie, who would probably call herself a feminist, dares to suggest that the problem is partly because feminism failed to keep up, after certain popular discourses (Cosmo, and later Madonna, and then the Spice Girls, then Destiny's Child) picked up the ball and ran with it. (They popularised certain ideas -- assertiveness for women, basically -- but also of course didn't carry forward all of feminism's messages. The idea that you shouldn't have to conform to a glamorous ideal, for example, seems to have been lost here). McRobbie realistically recognises that young women today grew up in a time when feminism was the language used by some well-established authority figures -- it's like the voice of your parents! We couldn't expect them to just accept that ideology -- rebellion is much more healthy. And in fact, it's not like the new generations have rejected feminism -- they have embraced it really, but they wouldn't call it 'feminism' because of feminism's image problem.

But, as you say, although the popular remix of feminism is accepted by young women, it remains the case that most women and men remain somewhat constricted within particular gender roles. My students would say 'That's because we like it like this,' but I still think it's rather too delineated. What do you think has been the significance (or not) of the populist remix of feminism put forward by Cosmo and the confident female pop groups?

Feminist critics also focused attention on how female adolescents constructed gendered identities through responses to romance novels and teenage magazines (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Christian-Smith, 1994; Finders, 1997; McRobbie, 1993). Pre-adolescent females constructed their responses to a romance novel around categories of "good" versus "bad" girl defined within the historical context of patriarchic discourse (Enciso, 1998). The females in this study collectively created their own subject position for dealing with the contradictions or double-binds associated with being both “good” and “bad” girls in school. This research also examines how, even within gender groups, adolescent females respond in ways that serve to socially exclude others students perceived to have less power (Finders, 1997). They also examined how teen magazines position and socialize adolescent females to assume membership in imaginary communities of consumption, noting the ways in which, for example, ads address readers as “you,” in an attempt to create a “synthetic sisterhood” (Currie, 1999). And, they examined how the beauty industry’s merchandizing and marketing associated with products such as the Barbie Doll served to construct gender identities (Wasson-Ellam, 1997).

More attention has also been given to analysis of how masculinity is constructed in media texts, particularly in terms of male power/control and in terms of portrayals of violence in computer games and films:
Tough Guise
Game Over
Wrestling With Manhood

University of Iowa Communications Department site [lots of links on gender and the media]

Discussions of theories of gender and sexuality by Dino Felluga

An excellent set of essays on role models in popular culture, with a particular focus on magazines, related to gender

A discussion of masculinity and academic discourses

Further applications of gender theory to media

Hundreds of sites related to feminism

For the application of feminist criticism to television, go to:
Feminist Criticism and Television

Films/videos on women, gender, and feminism

For abstracts on the following books, see:
Gender and culture
Queer theory books

Bornstein, K. (1998), My Gender Workbook. New York: Routledge.

Bristow, J. (1997), Sexuality. New York: Routledge.

Brooks, A. (1997). Postfeminisms: Feminism, cultural theory and cultural forms. New York: Routledge.

Brunsdon, C., D’Acci, J., & Spigel, L. (Eds.). (1997). Feminist television criticism: A reader. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carson, D., Dittmar, L., & Welsch, J. (Eds.). (1995). Multiple voices in feminist film criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clare, A. (2001). On men: Masculinity in crisis. London: Arrow.

Eagleton, M. (1996), Working with Feminist Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (1976). The history of sexuality Volume One: The will to knowledge. New York: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader (Ed.), P. Rabinow. New York: Penguin.

Halperin, D. (1995), Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harding, J. (1998). Sex acts: Practices of femininity and masculinity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hermes, J. (1995), Reading women's magazines. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center - Second Edition. London: Pluto Press.

Humm, M. (1997). Feminism and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Jackson, P., Stevenson, N. & Brooks, K. (2001), Making sense of men's magazines. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Joyrich, L. (1996). Re-viewing reception: Television, gender, and postmodern culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Kaplan, E. A. (1997). Looking for the other: Feminism, film, and the imperial gaze. New York: Routledge.

Kaplan, E. A. (Ed.). (2000). Feminism and film. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, A. (1994). Women’s pictures: Feminism and cinema. London: Verso.

McRobbie, A. (1999), In the culture society: Art, fashion and popular music. New York: Routledge.

Nixon, S. (1996), Hard looks: Masculinities, spectatorship and contemporary consumption. London: UCL.

Ruby, R. (1998). Chick flicks: Theories and memories of the feminist film movement. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Schwichtenberg, C. (Ed.). (1993), The Madonna connection: Representational politics, subcultural identities, and cultural theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

Smelik, A. (2003). And the mirror cracked: Feminist cinema and film theory. New York: Palgrave.

Thornham, S. (1997). Passionate detachments: An introduction to feminist film theory. London: Arnold.

Thornham, S. (Ed.). (1999). Feminist film theory: A reader. New York: New York University Press.

Whatling, C. (1997), Screen dreams: Fantasising lesbians in film. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

Whiteley, S. (2000), Women and popular music: Sexuality, identity and subjectivity. New York: Routledge.

Application: There is explicit reference to gender roles in the Secret ad. How would feminists examine these portrayal of roles in the ad?

Module 4: Word document

Applying Critical Perspectives to an Ad

Rhetorical/Audience Analysis

Semiotic Theory

Poststructuralist/ DeconstructivistTheory: Interrogating Language Codes/Categories

Critical Discourse Analysis

Psychoanalytic Theories

Feminist Criticism

Postmodern Theory

Postcolonial Theory

References