эссе по феминизмуHow can feminist theory be used to critique the representation of women in the media?
Representations of women in the media have been studied and explored by many scholars, especially feminist critics. Many books have been written on sexualisation of women, objectification of women, and overly glamourised images of women, especially in advertisements and films, but the fact is, a lot has changed since the 1960s, when glamorous and happy housewives was the only portrayal the media could offer. Visual media are taken by feminists to be a cultural practice representing myths (or, perhaps, truth) about women and femininity. Early feminist critics looked at the negative female stereotypes, mostly in classical Hollywood movies (Smelik, 2007, p. 491). One of the dominant paradigms film theorists used to study in the portrayal of female characters in film was psychoanalysis, now associated mainly with Laura Mulvey and her work. The way media represented femininity and womanhood has always been highly critiqued by most of the feminist authors, but the essay will look not only at the issues of superficial images of women throughout the history, but also at the improvement of the situation since the 1960s, when Betty Friedman wrote her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique. Drawing on the examples of contemporary television series Mad Men (AMC, 2007) and The Good Wife (CBS, 2009), the essay will explore how the perceptions of women have changed over the last decades.
One of the most influential works on the representations of women is written by a British feminist Laura Mulvey. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, published in 1975, Mulvey started with an intention to use psychoanalysis in order to interpret the reflexion of sexual difference in film, which, she argues, controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle (Mulvey, 1989, p. 14). Mulvey considers the cinema ‘an advanced representation system’, and explores the ways the unconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking (Mulvey, 1989, p. 15). She argues that there are different possible pleasures offered by the cinema (or television, for that matter); one of them is scopophilia – the pleasure in looking. She refers to Freud’s work on sexuality and makes an example of voyeuristic activities of children and their curiosity to see private and forbidden. Freud associated scopophilia with "taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, 1989, p. 16). The conditions of screening give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world (Mulvey, 1989, p. 17). Mulvey uses Freud's and Lacan's theories as the tools to psychoanalyse scopophilia (voyeuristic), and Lacan's theory of the mirror child. Jacques Lacan has described the way a child recognises its own image in the mirror and how it constructs the ego (Mulvey, 1989, p. 17). This idea is relevant to the idea of the pleasure in looking, as, according to Lacan, “the mirror phase occurs at a time when children's physical ambitions go beyond their motor capacity, which results in their mirror image being more complete and perfect that they actually experience in their own body” (Mulvey, 1989, p. 17). Thus, Laura Mulvey describes different aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in a cinematic situation – the first, scopophilic aspect, which comes from the pleasure in looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation, and the second arises from identification with the image seen. The cinema seems to create an illusion of reality, where libido and ego has found the perfect fantasy world (Mulvey, 1989, p. 18). The psychoanalytical theory establishes the background to the most important part of Mulvey's essay – the concept of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look”, which explores the pleasure in looking and splits it between dual stereotypes - active/ male and passive/ female. The ‘male gaze’ theory explains that the gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, so that women play the exhibitionist role and are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their image coded for strong visual and erotic impact (Mulvey, 1989, p. 19). This means that women become sexual objects that signify male desire. Mulvey describes two types of the male gaze: one suggests that the woman functions as erotic object for the male characters within the screen narrative, the other, that she functions as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium (Mulvey, 1989, p. 19).
As such, Mulvey’s main idea is that the most important role women play within the narrative (whether it is in film or television) is the role of an erotic object to please the male spectator. Although Mulvey has always been criticised for avoiding the existence of the female spectator in her arguments, she has made a valid point by explaining the place women have been put in by the media in the patriarchal world. Of course, Mulvey has been studying mainly old Hollywood movies and film stars like Marilyn Monroe, and a lot has changed since then. There have always been arguments over definitions of gender and certain norms of femininity, but during the 1990s, in the era of the third-wave feminism, more and more independent and strong female characters started to appear, especially on television, and the line between femininity and masculinity was, to some extent, erased. Defined and represented through the patriarchal discourse, women used to be seen as passive, receptive, nurturant, emotional, and men were usually seen as active and dominant (Whiteley, 2000, p. 120). Such stereotypes are damaging and just negative images of women based on men’s versions of femininity. A French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, for example, described femininity as male-defined, so the realisation of a different, female-defined, femininity required a change in the patriarchal symbolic order (Weedon, 1997, pp. 60-61). The active/ passive gender stereotypes do not necessarily apply to the modern representations of women (and men), as contemporary cinema and television have been offering the audiences new types of female protagonists, mixing up femininity and masculinity – like Jodie Foster’s character in The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), Buffy - the vampire slayer from the television series of the same name (The WB, 1997-2003), or Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004).
But there is one particular television series that has been distinctive in terms of feminism – an American drama series Mad Men has even been called the TV’s most feminist show (The Washington Post, 2010). The critically acclaimed series is set at the fictional advertising company in New York in the 1960s. The main character,Don Draper – a handsome creative director, is a womaniser despite being married to a suburban housewife Betty and having two kids. The main characters of the show are not only men, as the title may suggest, as there are quite a few female characters creating a group of ‘Mad Women’. The first episode introduces its female heroines: Peggy Olson is a new secretary, naive and modest, Joan is a curvy and glamorous office manager; Rachel is a Jewish businesswoman; Midge is Don’s mistress; and, lastly, Betty Draper – beautiful and unhappy housewife is married to Don. The whole theme of the series follows the themes explored by the writer often credited with ‘sparking’ the second-wave feminism in the 1960s – Betty Friedan. In her revolutionary book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan was the first to acknowledge that women in America were unhappy, but the problem women suffered from had no name (Friedan, 1962, p. 20). In her book, she explains that there is a strange discrepancy between the reality of women’s lives and the image to which they are trying to conform, calling it the feminine mystique (Friedan, 1962, p. 11). The image that media were trying to impose on women was the image of a perfect housewife whose life was confined to cooking, cleaning, and bearing children. The problem was, such view gave women only two options – either becoming a housewife or denying their femininity. Thus, in the Mad Men pilot, there are several women represented that have chosen the second option. Peggy Olson comes to work for an advertising agency as a secretary. Although she looks prudish, she still attracts the ‘male gaze’ from every male character in the office, one of them even asking her if she was Amish and telling her: “If you pull your waist in a little bit, you might look like a woman” (Mad Men, 2007). As such, the series represent the 1960s and the attitude towards women during this period, when a single woman in her early twenties was considered Amish or unfeminine and career-driven. Back then, women could only have one occupation - housewife. Mad Men provides three distinctive female stereotypes of the 1960s – the first one is Peggy – the ‘librarian type’ – a not so attractive single girl who works as a secretary, unhappy in both personal life and at work. The second stereotype is represented by Rachel, a businesswoman who comes to the agency as a client. She is in her thirties and, of course, she is single. In one scene in the pilot episode Don asks her why she is not married, as a husband and kids will make any woman happy. Rachel replies that work is her only thrill and she has chosen work over putting on an apron. However, while talking about happiness, she notices Don’s sad face and exclaims in surprise: “It must be hard being a man, too!” (Mad Men, 2007). This is what Betty Friedan acknowledged herself in The Feminine Mystique by saying that “man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim” (Friedan, 1962). Perhaps women were not the only ones to suffer from “the problem that had no name”. However, Mad Men is a modern interpretation of the times Friedan was writing about, so it is written with great knowledge and insight into the later feminist practices. But the third stereotype in the series is probably describing most of the women in the sixties – Betty Draper – a perfect housewife. In the episode when Don returns home late at night, he finds Betty already sleeping in bed. She is in her night-clothes, her hair is not done, but, amazingly, she wears lipstick. It resembles the images of perfect women in old women’s magazines and advertisements, where the housewife is always wearing makeup even as she is vacuuming the floor (Friedan, 1962, p. 65). Thus, Mad Men is a great reminder of what women’s lives used to be and invites female viewers imaginatively to try on this kind of femininity. Although Mad Men is a show created long after the second-wave feminism, it is a perfect exploration of the past and illustrates gender politics, creating the verisimilitude of women’s condition in the 1960s (Haralovich, 2011, p. 161).
If Mad Men is representing the past, then an American legal drama The Good Wife is representing the post-feminist utopian (or anti-utopian) future. The genre of legal drama is notable in a sense that it does not really associate itself with women as it usually deals with rather dark plotlines like crime and violence. E. Ann Kaplan, for instance, looks into the ‘appropriate’ genres for women (within the narrative or for female spectators), saying that family melodrama is the only genre where women and female issues can be central. She argues that the male-dominated world has always excluded women in a way, as they are excluded from the central role in the more respected genres (Kaplan, 1983, pp. 24-25).
She thus follows Lacan's idea that a girl has to enter the symbolic world which involves subject and object, and is the recipient of male desire, passively appearing rather than acting. But The Good Wife simply crosses out such idea. There certainly are female stereotypes in this television series, but the women in the show definitely cannot be called ‘passively appearing’ just for men’s pleasure. Here, the ‘male gaze’ plays almost the last role within the narrative.
The series focuses on Alicia Florrick, whose husband, Peter Florrick, a former state’s attorney, has been jailed following a public sex and corruption scandal. Alicia returns to her old job as a junior associate to provide for her two children.
The first episode starts with an opening shot of Alicia holding her husband’s hand as they come on stage in front of the journalists where Peter makes an official statement following the political corruption and sex scandal. Alicia stands behind her husband, so, as feminists say, “the personal becomes political”. Peter is imprisoned, and Alicia is forced to go back to work even though she has been a suburban housewife for almost fifteen years. She is “the good wife”, she does not divorce her husband despite the sex scandal involving a prostitute, she only slaps him in the corridor off-stage without saying a word. In these sequence Alicia looks pale and exhausted, but as soon as her first day at work is shown, she looks glamorous and confident, but not in a suburban housewife kind of way. Because she is now the breadwinner in the family, she tries on the masculine side of her femininity – she wears a formal (yet feminine) suit, and she realises that she is in a competition with a typical white male career-driven junior associate Cary. When Alicia attends the conference, the audience is surprised to see a woman as a chairman of the meeting. Diane Lockhart is a businesswoman in her fifties, so when Alicia tells her she has not worked for fifteen years, Diane looks at her with disapproval and almost shock. This is exactly reverse to what can be seen in Mad Men, where it would be Alicia – a perfect housewife – judging Diane’s choice of career over marriage. It may seem that the situation has completely changed since the 1960s, but then Diane offers Alicia a good advice: “Men can be lazy, women cannot” (The Good Wife, 2009). When Alicia gets her first case, she meets Kalinda – the firm’s private investigator. Kalinda is young, attractive, and bisexual, not the person one can expect to see as an investigator. Thus, Alicia and Kalinda, in formal suits, with briefcases, investigate a murder. The audience can only imagine what the housewives of the sixties would think of the two women in the twenty first century solving a murder. Even the title, The Good Wife, implies the importance of female characters. Women are no longer just ‘objects’, and the despair that the only way to fulfil femininity is to become a wife and a mother no longer exists, as the good wife has to work as well. But the question remains, is it a good thing?
Once, being a housewife was considered an occupation, but nowadays women are expected to do both: having a full-time job and being a full-time housewife. Angela McRobbie reminds that feminism attracted mixed reactions from women, leading to anti-feminist movements. She writes that even Betty Friedan seemed to regret her earlier writing, and many feminist writers were saying that ‘actually we got it wrong’, or ‘feminism did not work, it was too anti-men, too pro-lesbian and far too anti-family, cutting women off from the pleasures of having children’ (McRobbie, 2009, p. 31). Women used to think they were unhappy in their suburban perfect houses with children, but as Friedan named it herself – the problem existed, but it did not have a name. The television series Mad Men shows the gender inequalities during the times when women were struggling with fulfilling their potential and were generally unhappy. But so were men, apparently, as Don Draper, too, had ‘the problem with no name’. Unlike Mad Men, the contemporary series about modern society present women as confident and independent, but now the characters in the film and television shows are expected to be successful in their full-time jobs and be in the eternal pursuit of happiness in personal life, not always managing to combine both. Sometimes ‘occupation: housewife’ sounds like an attractive offer, but thanks to the second-wave feminists, film and television writers have plenty ideas on storylines for female characters now. As one of the characters in Sex and the City said: “I do not have time for a full-time man, I have a full-time job!” This sums up the modern representation of a woman.