Summary van Zoonen, Liesbet. 1994. “Introduction” and “‘New’ Themes.” In Feminist Media Studies, 1-28 for Introduction to Gender Studies at UU. (2018/2019)
Summary van Zoonen, Liesbet. 1994. “Introduction” and “‘New’ Themes.” In Feminist
Media Studies, 1-28
According to non-feminist scholars logics, a feminist viewpoint on the media implies a
univocal, confident and unswerving denunciation of popular culture, both for its sexist and
oppressive portrayal of women and for the devastating effects it is supposed to have on
society. They claim that feminists draw a narrow picture of media and cultural practice,
although this is exactly the one most want you to make. Within the women’s movement
wholesale and merciless condemnations of media output are commonplace. However, there
is an enormous heterogeneity of feminist media theory and research. They are working
towards a more varied portrayal of women and sexual minorities in the media.
Feminism
Used to be united in the quest for the cause of women’s oppression, assumed to lie in social
structure. Now not easily defined. Contemporary feminists often prefer to speak of
‘emancipatory’ instead of ‘feminist’: feminism was another struggle and the battle of former
generations. For black women feminism symbolises a discourse insensitive and irrelevant to
their concerns. → Such controversies have generated the insight that ‘women’ cannot be
unified; a challenge for feminism to build politics that acknowledge, respect and
accommodates difference.
This fragmentation makes it impossible to speak of ‘feminist’ theory as consistent and
homogeneous, but there are still common concepts: focus on analysing gender as
structuring material and symbolic words and our experiences. Power is not a monolithic
‘thing’, society is not constituted by orderly and dichotomous divisions of oppressors and
oppressed. The issue for feminism is not who is ‘in power’ and who isn’t, but to theorize the
multiplicity of power relations (such as gender) and analyse how they are being constituted.
Gender is perceived as a discourse.
Cultural studies
Culture and representation are important battlegrounds for feminism. Cultural struggles
in contemporary first world societies on the nature of femininity, masculinity and feminism
aren’t only fought in the symbolic realm, but also in the area of human existence (daily
life). Gender is being contested by those meaning to undermine traditional definitions of
gender and by those yearning to maintain them. ‘Culture’ are the conditions and forms in
which meaning and value are structured and articulated within a society, therefore gender is
a crucial component of culture. Cultural studies approaches are concerned with
manifestations of popular culture and issues of representation and collective identities and
have grown out of Marxist theory/left politics/progressivism (better understanding of relations
of power and exclusion). For feminism the assumption usually is that masculine discourse in
media texts can be attributed to the quantitative and qualitative dominance of men in media
production: an enduring issue in feminist media theory.
An important cultural studies framework is Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ of
meaning in media texts model: meaning is ‘encoded’ in institutionalized processes of media
production in discursive forms that do not constitute a closed ideological system. With the
‘decoding’ by audiences, they do not need to produce meaning similar to that produced by
the institution; ‘misunderstanding’.
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