Media studies of sex and gender are rooted in the history of feminist media studies. They are often approached as a combination of critical and interpretive studies, though behavioral studies are common as well. Feminist media theory is centered on the analysis of idealized femininities as projected within popular culture. These idealized representations of what it means to be female fall well within heteronormative values, meaning they reflect the gender ideals associated with patriarchy, heterosexuality, and traditionally understood gender roles. Within this framework, feminist media studies center around the critique of characterizations of women on screen in film and television as reinforcing repressive stereotypes about women and women's roles in society. A foundational argument is Mulvey's (1975/1992) male gaze, which critiques the objectification of women in films as characters “to-be-looked-at” (p. 27) rather than characters to act as full agents from a subject positionality. In other words, the woman on screen becomes, specifically, the object of the gaze: of the male characters, the camera, and the audience.
Media studies also look at the roles women play in media production. Women have always been involved in the culture industry, and were early leaders in the development of modern media. The first fiction film, The Cabbage Fairy, was directed by a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, in 1896. The first female general manager of a Hollywood studio Julia Crawford in 1915 (Seger, 1996). Yet these and many other early firsts and successes for women are overshadowed by the historical reality that women in Hollywood have filled only a small percentage of director and producer jobs. In 1908 the industry paper, The Film Index reported that "Women's chances of making a living have been increased by the rise of the cinematographic machines" (Slide, 1996). Yet, from looking at the media industry, we can see that women have not held the dominant power or placement of men.
Women in the Culture Industry
Women as storytellers is one way that contemporary media theorists construct and problematize the gendered nature of the industry. The example of Alice Guy-Blaché as the first fiction film director highlights this interpretation. Guy-Blaché made her film at a time when the male-dominated industry was primarily using film technology to create documentaries and visual studies of real life. The film was only about 90 seconds long, and is a short fairy tale, a genre associated with women and children (Seger, 1996), who were also seen as the likely audience for films (Slide, 1996). It was her idea to tell a story through film, and after her success the head of her Parisian studio, Leon Gaumont, placed her in charge of the fiction production arm of the studio. She directed over 400 films for the studio before starting her own company in New York, Solax, eventually producing more than 600 films in her career (McMahan, 2002).
Appropriations of artistic style is another means of critique of the lack of high-ranking women in the industry. One of the early Hollywood stories of female work appropriated by men is the story of German animator Lotte Reiniger. Reiniger was a pioneer in early film and animation techniques, and was the creator of the first feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). She also invented the first multiplane camera, with the ability to layer images. Both creations, the camera and the first feature-length animation however, are generally attributed to Walt Disney, and Reiniger's contributions obscured (Taylor, 2011).
Reineger's story was complicated by the international depression and its impact on Germany, the Second World War, and the dominance of US popular culture in the first half of the 20th century (Taylor, 2011). Given those complications it's easy to understand why so few people are aware of her contributions. However, her story is certainly not the only story of a woman overshadowed by her male colleagues and competitors in the history of the Culture Industry.
During the silent film era, multiple women including Guy-Blaché and silent film star Mary Pickford helmed studios. Women also made films that dealt with social issues of interest to women audience.
From the 1930s through the late 1980s there were very few women in positions of power in the industry. Critiques of this gap in women's empowerment are often tied to the dominance of the male gaze or male audience preference, including arguments that as audiences grew and more men were in the audience watching films to relieve stress, and so the goal of producing for women and children gave way to a dominant male (and white) audience (Hurd, 2007; Quart, 1988) and was reinforced by the Hollywood Production Code and male-dominated unionization (Hurd, 2007). This resulted in what is recognized in feminist literature as the masculinization of the industry (Bielby, 2009; Tuckman, 1989).
Women as Performers
In the forward to the third edition of Molly Haskell's groundbreaking From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of women in the movies, Dargis (2016) states:
Yet one of the great paradoxes of the movies—and perhaps its saving grace—is that even while women were bing kept out of the studio front offices and director's chair, the star system was producing immortals like Pickford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe—and on and on and on. Women were shut out of the power corridors of an industry that they were helping to build, creating art and beauty, obscuring sexism and racism (p. ix).
Haskell's arguments are built around the inherent misogyny of the Hollywood system. In her third edition, she examines how Mulvey's male gaze has been turned back on men in contemporary 21st century film. However, the challenge for women to enter and maintain high-level careers throughout Hollywood history still impacts women in today's culture industry. The 2017 #MeToo movement which dominated the culture industry with reports of sexual harassment and misogynistic attitudes toward women is a direct reflection of the history of the industry including the repression of women.
The gender wage and employment gaps in the culture industry has a long history that reflects both patriarchal norms and the studio system, unionization, agency system, and other institutional components of the industry as a whole.
In the first half of the 20th century in Hollywood, screenwriters, actors, and other participants in the industry were salaried employees of the studios. This would shift in the 1970s to individuals being employed in temporary status for individual productions. The masculinization of the production end of the film industry mentioned above was reinforced by the belief that women should write (and produce) women's stories (Bielby, 2009), ironically echoing how Guy-Blaché created the first fiction film. In the 1970s the shift to production-based work coincides with an increase in women writers.
The television industry reflected similar characteristics. Genre-oriented work aimed at women, like the soap opera, did have some presence of women at production levels. Irma Phillips created three long-lasting soap operas, The Guiding Light (1937-1949 as a radio serial; 1952-2009), As the World Turns (1956-2010), and Another World (1964-1999), and is often credited with creating the soap opera form. These were all created as Proctor and Gamble properties, and one of them, Another World, ran on a competing network to the other two, though the stories were meant to be interwoven with characters potentially interacting on all three properties. Agnes Nixon was another long-time soap opera writer and producer working in an overlapping era. Yet these examples were not the rule, and the majority of television writers and producers, especially for prime time, were male. It was not until the proliferation of cable television with its narrowcasting (aimed at specific audiences) rather than broadcasting (aimed at wide audiences) format that a marked increase in female writers, directors, and producers was seen (Bielby, 2009).
Psychoanalytic film theory
Laura Mulvey’s (1975) concept of the male gaze. This theory is based on the idea that male perspectives for film viewership are dominant for audiences. Drawing from Freudian theory, Mulvey argues that the female body symbolizes the threat of castration for male audience members. Therefore, film producers have to contain or limit her power, visually, on screen. To do this, female bodies are objectified. Mulvey claims that females therefore carry meaning in film, rather than creating meaning—in other words, female characters are to-be-looked-at rather than the ones doing the looking. Audience members therefore look at the characters on screen, through the gaze of the camera, the way that the male characters (who do the looking) look at the female ones. Mulvey’s critique is that this makes it challenging for women audience members, since they are limited to viewing from a male perspective. This means that films teach women to view other women and themselves as objects for male lust.
Mulvey uses Freudian psychoanalytic analysis to explain her theory: the female character is clearly identifiable as feminine and this contains her in a specific, objectified role meant, in part, to deflect male fears of castration and simultaneously present her as a fetish object for male pleasure. In addition, because point of view scenes in the classic films of her criticism are filmed from the perspective of a male character, the audience member becomes a voyeuristic spectator who identifies with the male character.
For Mulvey and many feminist critics that follow, the constant objectification of the female body on screen is problematic in multiple ways. First, it is problematic for female audience members who see themselves and their lives reflected by the objectified characters on screen. Second, it reinforces stereotypical categorizations for women and women's roles in society. Third, it allows male audience members to gaze at the female body onscreen as objects, reinforcing the tendency to do the same in live culture, an application often related to arguments such as the prevalence of rape culture and misogyny in society. Fourth, it also creates norms for male characters, relegating them to active subject roles, and indicating potential reinforcement of homophobic standards if a male were objectified instead.
Critic Steve Neale (1982) adds to this with the argument that male characters, on the other hand, are subjects—they are the primary action figures in the films. Unlike female characters who have to be limited because they may otherwise be threatening to men in the audience, male characters cannot be objectified because that may imply that men have to view them through a homosexual gaze.
To avoid sexual confusion for men, and the possibility that men may look at a male character through lust, the men are always shown in action, or as a spectacle or comedic figure that cannot be taken seriously. Consider Tarzan who, though he wears a loincloth, is shown as muscular and active, and usually is doing something action-oriented rather than posing for the camera or the other characters the way that female characters do.
bell hooks (1992) added another layer to this argument with her criticism that film carries a raced as well as gendered gaze. She argues, however, that not all viewers adhere to the gaze. She claims an oppositional gaze, meaning that black audiences are aware of the racial normalizing factors in film and television, and therefore view media products with skepticism and even a humorous eye. However, hooks also argues that the representation of black people in film recreates numerous affects of racism and oppression in culture.
This argument reaches back to Stuart Hall’s (1973, 1974) reception theory with the concepts of encoding and decoding reminding us that not all audiences automatically read texts the same way.
While some argue that the male gaze is now an outdated theory, we still see the constant objectification of female characters in mainstream contemporary media. Consider the example presented in the following image:
The male gaze can still be actively witnessed in contemporary media products, but the argument that it is not fully prescriptive is possible. Other feminist scholars agree, and have presented alternatives to the prescribed categorization from Mulvey's essay and theory.
The Hyperfeminine Masquerade
Doane, (1982/1992) building on Mulvey's theory, argues that the feminine appearance valued on screen to denote female characters and keep male audience members from confusing them with castrated males becomes a means of illustrating an empowered woman in a "safe" way for a homophobic audience. Since, as Irigaray (1977/1999) argued, women can only be objects within patriarchal language structure and Mulvey similarly argued regarding the film industry, Doane argues it's normal for women to want to act in the masculine position. However, especially in reference to the era of Hollywood films that Mulvey and Doane analyze, social norms and gender roles make it difficult for women to succeed in men's roles. Therefore, womanliness becomes a mask so a woman can hide her masculine characteristics: the feminine masquerade. Consider the exaggerated femininity in the image below:
Doane's masquerade, a discussion of hyperfeminine exaggerations that allow women to act in men's roles and in the subject position, becomes a way that female characters can present the power associated with males without raising the male audience members' fear of castration. The hyperfeminine can play out in two key ways, a woman exaggerating female characteristics that make her valuable in a traditional male-female relationship, i.e. Marilyn Monroe characters in films like Some Like it Hot; and as a bad girl with dominatrix or femme fatale qualities, i.e. Catwoman in the Batman comics, films, and television series, and Disney's characterizations of Maleficent.
References
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