Knowra Feminist media studies Feminist media studies Feminist media studies examines how media represent gender and participate in gendered power relations, including through production, technology, audiences, and institutions.
Gender representation : The ways media texts depict, characterize, and make gender socially meaningful. Analyzing representation shows how media make gender roles and identities visible or normal.
Second-wave feminism : A feminist movement that expanded across many countries from the 1960s through the 1980s. Its campaigns and critiques helped make mass media a central object of feminist inquiry.
bell hooks : An American feminist thinker and cultural critic who wrote about race, gender, and representation. Her oppositional gaze challenged accounts of spectatorship that treated women as a unified audience.
Feminist film criticism : The interpretation of films using feminist questions about gender, power, form, and spectatorship. Close analysis of films makes the field's theories of looking and narrative concrete.
Postfeminism : A cultural sensibility that treats feminism as already achieved while retaining selective feminist language and ideals. Its claims of individual choice can obscure the structural inequalities feminist media analysis investigates.
Male gaze : A way of framing visual culture around a presumed heterosexual masculine viewing position. The concept links camera perspective and spectacle to unequal power between viewers and viewed subjects.
Laura Mulvey : A British film theorist whose work developed influential feminist analysis of cinema and spectatorship. Her account of visual pleasure gave film studies a durable framework for analyzing gendered looking.
Angela McRobbie : A British cultural studies scholar known for research on gender, youth, popular culture, and media. Her work examined how popular culture negotiates femininity and contemporary feminism.
Women in media : The study of women's participation, visibility, and roles across media industries and content. It connects representational patterns with who gets to make and circulate media.
Queer theory : An approach that critiques fixed sexual and gender categories and examines how norms are produced. It complicates analyses that treat women or gender identities as stable, uniform groups.
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