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Les représentations médiatiques des femmes intersectionnelles dans les séries Netflixpar Judy Meri Université Cote D'Azur - Master 2022 |
Annexe:Figure 1: Traduction: (textes originaux) Lorber: « Sociobiologists have argued that inexorable workings of the genes create markedly different male and female behavior (E. O. Wilson 1975, 1978). Sociobiological and biosocial research designs and interpretations of data have been extensively criticized as inadequate proofthat biological sex alone produces gendered behavior. Put briefly, "any evaluation of the heritability of sex differences in behavior is hampered by . . . [an] interaction problem: males and females immediately enter different environments by virtue of their anatomical sex alone" (McClintock 1979, 705). The evidence of interaction between hormonal output and social situations suggests that the situation seems to influence hormone levels as much as hormone levels influence behavior. Physical bodies are always social bodies: "The body, without ceasing to be the body, is taken in hand and transformed in social practice" (Connell 1987, 83). » p40 Another example of discrimination against women on the basis of their physiology is the use of menstruation to call into question women's intellectual and physical capabilities. Since it is women, a subordinate group, who menstruate, menstruation has been used as a pervasive justification for their subordination (Delaney, Lupton, and Toth 1977). Notions of pollution were replaced in nineteenth-century Europe and America by scientific studies of the detrimental effects of higher education on women's ability to menstruate (Bullough and Voght 1973; Vertinsky 1990, 39-68). Premenstrual tension is another purportedly biological phenomenon that undermines women's social status (Rittenhouse 1991). It was described and attributed to hormonal causes sixty years ago; since then, most research has followed the biomedical model-- defining it as a syndrome, with a cause, a pathology located in the 139 individual. Critics have noted that there is confusion about what it is, when it occurs, whether it is a single syndrome, and what its effects are. Many women and men experience mood swings by the day ofthe week; for women, these may modify or intensify menstrual-cycle mood swings (Hoffmann 1982; Rossi and Rossi 1977). Mary Brown Parlee (1982b) found that individual women were less likely to attribute psychological mood swings to menstrual cycles than to other causes, such as reactions to difficulties at work or at home; when the data were grouped, however, the influence of menstrual cycles was magnified because the other patterns were idiosyncratic. Daily self-reports gave "a picture of what might be called 'premenstrual elation syndrome' that is the opposite o f the negative one embodied in the stereotype of premenstrual tension" (Parlee 1982b, 130). Retrospective reports from these same women described their feelings in stereotypical terms. One woman physician sardonically commented that perhaps the effects of what is defined as premenstrual syndrome-- anger and irritability-- stand out because this behavior is in contrast to three weeks of pleasant sociability (Guinan 1988). Emily Martin (1987) suggests that from a feminist perspective, premenstrual tension can be positive--not only a release of ordinarily suppressed anger at the everyday put-downs women are subject to, but a different kind of consciousness, concentration, and creativity: "Does the loss of ability to concentrate mean a greater ability to free-associate? Loss of muscle control, a gain in ability to relax? Decreased efficiency, increased attention to a smaller number of tasks?" (128). Menopause, too, has been defined as a disease, and social factors are discounted. Western culture imposes a negative connotation of distance, a sense that body and mind are separate, on women's experience of menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, and childbirth. Western women are given no chance to contemplate their bodies as located in time and place and as theirs, the way men in our culture experience erections and orgasms as extensions of themselves. What women may ignore as a routine, tolerable occurrence becomes a syndrome, a pathology, an "illness," when it is so labeled by the medical profession (Dodd 1989; Fisher 1986). Although there certainly are women who could benefit from medical amelioration of disabling premenstrual, menstrual, and menopausal conditions, they are not necessarily the majority (Yankauskas 1990). Nonetheless, all women are said to suffer from (and make others suffer in turn) the "horrors" of "that time of the month" or "that time of life." In our society, these syndromes denigrate women as a group and justify their less-than-human social status. Since adult women will be experiencing one or another of these physiological conditions 140 throughout their lifetime, to the extent that women are defined by their biology, they are all "sick" most of the time.97» P.47-49 Gender is so pervasive that in our society we assume it is bred into our genes. Most people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and re-created out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly "doing gender" (West and Zimmerman 1987). And everyone "does gender" without thinking about it. Today, on the subway, I saw a well-dressed man with a year-old child in a stroller. Yesterday, on a bus, I saw a man with a tiny baby in a carrier on his chest. Seeing men taking care of small children in public is increasingly common-- at least in New York City. But both men were quite obviously stared at--and smiled at, approvingly. Everyone was doing gender--the men who were changing the role of fathers and the other passengers, who were applauding them silently. But there was more gendering going on that probably fewer people noticed. The baby was wearing a white crocheted cap and white clothes. You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap on the child's head. Ah, a boy, I thought. Then I noticed the gleam oftiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done. For the individual, gender construction starts with assignment to a sex category on the basis of what the genitalia look like at birth. 2 Then babies are dressed or adorned in a way that displays the category because parents don't want to be constantly asked whether their baby is a girl or a boy. A sex category becomes a gender status through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers. Once a child's gender is evident, others treat those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different treatment by feeling different and behaving differently. As soon as they can talk, they start to refer to themselves as members of their gender. Sex doesn't come into play again until puberty, but by that time, sexual feelings and desires and practices have been shaped by gendered norms and expectations. Adolescent boys and girls approach and avoid each other in an elaborately scripted and gendered mating dance. Parenting is gendered, with different expectations for mothers and for fathers, and people of different genders work at different kinds ofjobs. The work adults do as mothers and fathers and as low-level workers and high-level bosses, shapes women's and men's life experiences, and these experiences produce different feelings, consciousness, relationships, skills-- ways of being 97 Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of Gender. Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University Press, 2008. 141 that we call feminine or masculine.3 All of these processes constitute the social construction of gender. we have to look not only at the way individuals experience gender but at gender as a social institution. As a social institution, gender is one of the major ways that human beings organize their lives. Human society depends on a predictable division of labor, a designated allocation of scarce goods, assigned responsibility for children and others who cannot care for themselves, common values and their systematic transmission to new members, legitimate leadership, music, art, stories, games, and other symbolic productions. One way of choosing people for the different tasks of society is on the basis oftheir talents, motivations, and competence-- their demonstrated achievements. The other way is on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity--ascribed membership in a category of people. Although societies vary in the extent to which they use one or the other ofthese ways of allocating people to work and to carry out other responsibilities, every society uses gender and age grades. Every society classifies people as "girl and boy children," "girls and boys ready to be married," and "fully adult women and men," constructs similarities among them and differences between them, and assigns them to different roles and responsibilities. Personality characteristics, feelings, motivations, and ambitions flow from these different life experiences so that the members of these different groups become different kinds of people. The process of gendering and its outcome are legitimated by religion, law, science, and the society's entire set o f values. Western society's values legitimate gendering by claiming that it all comes from physiology-- female and male procreative differences. But gender and sex are not equivalent, and gender as a social construction does not flow automatically from genitalia and reproductive organs, the main physiological differences of females and males. In the construction of ascribed social statuses, physiological differences such as sex, stage of development, color of skin, and size are crude markers. They are not the source of the social statuses of gender, age grade, and race. Social statuses are carefully constructed through prescribed processes of teaching, learning, emulation, and enforcement. Whatever genes, hormones, and biological evolution contribute to human social institutions is materially as well as qualitatively transformed by social practices. The building blocks of gender are socially constructed statuses. Mary Beard ; Throughout the ages of attention to the phenomenon of woman, she has been variously represented, as mysterious an idea probably derived from the long mystery concerning the creation of human life; a favorite of the gods who granted her childbirth and taught her how to invent the industrial arts and make crops grow where crops had not grown before the arts of living; an interceder with superhuman beings, even a goddess herself, through appeals to whom mortals could get protection, mercy, justice, or revenge a source of help in 142 bearing struggles in the "mortal coil" or diversion from the routines of the "squirrel cage." Woman has been depicted as a creature wholly dominated by mother love: superior on account of her maternal function to the erratic, wandering, lustful male, his inferior by reason of her bondage to that function; the more conservative and less progressive sex; a demon who brought evil into the world of good men through. tempting them to love her; man's subject and a passive slave after he « subdued her »; direct in her methods; in direct in her methods an intriguer; completely in tutelage to men's superior mentality; inspirational in influence as a result of her intuitive intelligence; her own worst enemy; an energizing force; an enervating force; selfish; cooperative; destructive; creative; the hope and guardian of civilization. In short, woman has been every kind of being in minds conscious of mind. She has been used for explanations of good and evil in the world; of misery and happiness; of inertia, or traditional behavior; of idealism and social improvement; of tyranny and sensitiveness to human values. With the theme of woman more satisfaction can apparently be found for the making of sweeping generalizations about the way of all life than with any other romance of the mind. Martin: What makes anything a social institution? Without explicit conceptualization or criteria, it is difficult to tell. "The only idea common to all usages of the term institution is that of some sort of establishment of relative permanence of a distinctly social sort," according to Hughes. Nearly all conceptions depict institutions as controlling, obligating, or inhibiting, although some also note their facilitating and empowering effects (see Berger & Luckmann 1966, Giddens 1984, and March & Olsen 1989 on this point). In the mid-twentieth century, many sociologists equated social institutions with ideas, norms, values, or beliefs with no attention to processes or practices. This narrow and static definition has been under challenge for some time by scholars who assert the centrality of practices in constituting social institutions (Giddens 1984; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina & Von Savigny 2001). No institution is totally separate from others; each links to others, often extensively (Roscigno 2000). For example, gender and sexuality are intertwined - as are gender and family, gender and work/the economy, gender and religion - but so are family and the polity/ state, family and the economy, economy and the polity/state, and education and the polity/state, and so forth (Acker 1992). Assuming that any institution is separate from others will produce flawed understanding (Nisbet 1953).» The state has, for example, codified many aspects of gender into laws or regulations. For instance, it requires a birth certificate and driver's license to list a person's gender. It prohibited women's right to vote in national elections until the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It gave employers the right to pay women less, offering unequal pay for equal work, until the national Equal Pay Act was passed into law in 1963. 143 Laws both reflect and create gender inequality when they lend state authority to gender institution practices by assigning women to an inferior status as citizens and workers. In recent years, at the prompting of women's movement mobilization, the state has acted to enhance women's rights and opportunities (Ferree & Hess 2000). Conceptualizing gender as a social institution is necessary to make the origins and perpetuation of gender explicit. Doing so increases awareness of gender's sociality and susceptibility to human agency and has the effect of undermining popular presumptions that gender is somehow "natural," biological, and essential (Lorber 1994). While "traditional" institutions like the family, economy, and polity are accepted as "distinctly social" in character (Hughes [1936] 1971), gender is not. Gender is reduced by many scholars and by popular culture to biology - genes, hormones, morphology - and psychology in ways that deny its sociality and susceptibility to social construction.» Social organization entails power because it produces differences that allocate resources, privilege, and opportunities differentially (Balzer 2003; Lukes 1974). The structuring of behavior through recursive practices privileges some practices over others, some practitioners over others. A conception of gender as an institution requires attention to power (Acker 1992). To ignore power is to fail to understand the hows and whys of "structures of inequality and exploitation" (Collins 1998:150). Competing interests exist. Acknowledging the "complexities within historically constructed groups as well as those characterizing relations among such groups" (Collins 1998:152-54) helps us discover how gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other "axes of difference" reflect power, singly and in combination. Gender is a product of people who occupy different positions and have conflicting identities and interests. Conflicts, inconsistency, and change are thus endemic to the gender institution as to others. Second-wave feminism - a gender institution dynamic since the late 1960s - has challenged or "unsettled" how gender is practiced in other institutions - the legal system, the educational system, marriage/home/family, the workplace, social class, heterosexuality, the military. Gender has "bumped against" these institutions, causing conflict and pressuring theto change (Nisbet 1953). Framing gender as a social institution shows how change is both resisted and accomplished over time. Lorber: It is difficult to see how gender is constructed because we take it for granted that it's all biology, or hormones, or human nature. The differences between women and men seem to be self-evident, and we think they would occur no matter what society did. But in actuality, human females and males are physiologically more similar in appearance than are the two sexes of many species of animals and are more alike than different in traits and behavior (C. F. Epstein 1988). Without the deliberate use o f gendered clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, and 144 cosmetics, women and men would look far more alike. Even societies that do not cover women's breasts have gender-identifying clothing, scarification, jewelry, and hairstyles.» Although the possible combinations of genitalia, body shapes, clothing, mannerisms, sexuality, and roles could produce infinite varieties in human beings, the social institution of gender depends on the production and maintenance of a limited number of gender statuses and of making the members of these statuses similar to each other. Individuals are born sexed but not gendered, and they have to be taught to be masculine or feminine. 15 As Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman . . . ; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature . . . which is described as feminine." (1952, 267). Children learn to walk, talk, and gesture the way their social group says girls and boys should. Ray Birdwhistell, in his analysis of body motion as human communication, calls these learned gender displays tertiary sex characteristics and argues that they are needed to distinguish genders because humans are a weakly dimorphic species-their only sex markers are genitalia (1970, 39-46). Clothing, paradoxically, often hides the sex but displays the gender. In early childhood, humans develop gendered personality structures and sexual orientations through their interactions with parents ofthe same and opposite gender. As adolescents, they conduct their sexual behavior according to gendered scripts. Schools, parents, peers, and the mass media guide young people into gendered work and family roles. As adults, they take on a gendered social status in their society's stratification system. Gender is thus both ascribed and achieved (West and Zimmerman 1987). Kawakami: The gender stereotype of women as warm, nurturing, and caring and the corresponding stereotype of men as cold, competitive, and authoritarian may have contributed to a popular perception that women are less effective than men in leadership positions, though in fact they are equally effective. Eagly, Karau, and Makhijani (1995) conducted a meta-analytic review of gender and leader effectiveness and concluded that men and women are equally effective leaders, unless the leadership role is gendered (people expect the leader to be male or female). In that case, leaders of the expected gender are more effective. That is, social role expectations influence leader effectiveness. The relationship between gender and perceived leadership is widely discussed in the current literature, and research has focused on two questions: how traits associ- ated with effective leadership are gendered, and how leaders acting outside of their gender roles are viewed. With regard to how leadership traits are gendered, research has shown that tra- ditional managerial roles are sex-typed as masculine, meaning that characteristics deemed necessary to be a successful manager are stereotypically associated with men. Schein and colleagues 145 (Schein, 1973; Schein, 1975; Schein & Mueller, 1992; Schein, Mueller, & Jacobson, 1989) have found that subjects perceive a successful middle manager as having characteristics more often held by men than by women. The expectation that successful managers will possess masculine traits is stronger among men than among women (Schein & Mueller, 1992). Similarly, Powell and Butterfield (1986) found that male undergraduate and part-time graduate business students also viewed good managers in masculine terms. These findings support the claim that managerial roles are widely perceived as being aligned with stereotypically male characteristics. Olsson: Does Exposure to Counterstereotypical Role Models Influence Girls' and Women's Gender Stereotypes and Career Choices? A Review of Social Psychological Research» the researchers explain a gender counterstereotype as: «A gender-counterstereotypical role model is an individual who engages in a role that is antithetical to gender stereotypes (e.g., a female CEO, a female scientist, or a male preschool teacher). Role models have been defined in various ways in the literature (for an overview, see Morgenroth et al., 2015). We follow the lead of other researchers and consider role models as «individuals who influence [children's, adolescents,' and young adults'] achievements, motivation, and goals by acting as behavioral models, representations of the possible, and/or inspirations» (Morgenroth et al., 2015, p. 468). Reversing...: Stereotypical social roles are predominant in society, mak- ing it difficult to contest them. For instance, by behaving counterstereotypically women risk social and economic penalties (i.e., backlash), which in turn can make an indi- vidual less willing to manifest stereotype-disconfirming behavior (e.g., Eagly & Karau, 2002; Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992; Rudman & Fairchild, 2004; Rudman & Glick, 1999). However, we should not necessarily assume that women always passively accept the discrimination im- plied by gender role distributions, as social changes in modern societies demonstrate. Despite prevailing gender discrimination (United Nations, UNO Women, 2011), women have nearly attained equality with men in several formerly male-dominated fields (such as law or medicine), and as they take on male-stereotypic roles, women are increasingly adopting agentic attributes (e.g., Abele, 2003; Twenge, 2001). Some research has shown that exposure to such counterstereotypical exemplars either in reality (Das- gupta & Asgari, 2004) or via mental imagery (Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001) can reduce the activation of automatic gender stereotypes. As in many other Western countries, this prevalence of gender segregation at home and the workplace, as well as the contrasting tendency to increase female representation in male-dominated fields, is present in Spanish society today (Eurostat, 2006; Goñi-Legaz, Ollo-López, & Bayo-Moriones, 2010). 146 St. Pierre: Feminists divide the women's movement into three "waves." The first wave began in the mid- 1800s. Some find it convenient to say it began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. This wave is said to have concluded about 1920, when the Suffrage Bill was passed. The second wave of the women's movement began in the early 1960s, and John F. Kennedy's appointment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 is often considered a starting point. In 1963 the Equal Pay Act was passed, and Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act passed, in 1966 the National Organization for Women was established, and in 1971 the National Women's Political Conference was held. Ania: Feminism represents institutional and grassroot activities for abolishing gender-based inequalities with respect to women and their social standing. From its very outset, feminism has interacted with the media practically and critically. Understanding the power of communication technologies and the role of media forms for shaping social standards and visibility, women's lib crusaders have looked for ways into the media scene in hope for larger audiences but also for a fairer representation of women through and in the men-dominated media professions. Beginning with the 1840s, they first engaged with the media via journalism (mostly informatory press, pamphlets, and leaflets) and editorial work, to later spread on further-reaching and more influential outlets (such as radio, television, the internet), and their related practices. The first wave represents the pioneering stage of feminist activism that spread in Europe and North America, Egypt, Iran, and India between the early 1800s and the first decades of the 20th century. Despite its international range, the first wave was most active in the United States and Western Europe as inspired by proto-feminist political writing of authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft (The Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792) or John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women, 1869). The first wave mobilized around the idea of the «New Woman»--an ideal of femininity that challenged limits established by male-centered society. The first wave relates to social campaigns that expressed dissatisfaction with women's limited rights for work, education, property, reproduction, marital status, and social agency. It is associated with women's suffrage--a movement advocating women's entitlement to vote, the flagship organization of which became the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (1904).The first-wave feminists' trust in the organized and visible form of protest showed through public gatherings, speeches, and writing. Their activism revolved around the press, which was the major information and communication medium at the turn of the century. The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, which emerged from the abolitionist movement, triggered an urge for a more active presence of women in North America and led to setting up The Lily (the first US 147 newspaper owned and edited by women) that coincided with French Le Voix des Femmes in Europe. Such journals allowed for a more balanced vision of femininity, providing a more thorough picture of the lives of women, especially with regard to their professional potential, and included women of color in the idea of womanhood thus defying the image promulgated in the bourgeoning women's popular magazines (e.g., The Lady's Magazine, Ladies' Magazine, and later Ladies' Home Journal). Early media coverage of first-wave feminists were unfavorable and biased. Media coverage was overtaken by the stereotypical trope of a bad looking, unfeminine advocate of women's liberation who hated all men. A moment of breaking through the glass ceiling for first-wave feminism was the inclusion of women in telegraphy. In the mid-19th century, many females in America and Europe «entered a challenging ... technological field in which they competed with men» to start a «subculture of technically educated workers» (Jepsen, 2000, p. 2). Kabalah : During colonial periods, most women received very little formal education. Girls typically learnt the skills needed to manage a home from their mother, thereby training them to become housewives. And when they did, the housefather is said to have had power over everything and everybody in the house. This power was called munt and it implied that he could sell or bill his wife, children or slaves and it was established through marriage. Hence, it was thought that a woman didn't need an education as she was supposed to work in the home (Becker et al, 1977: 41). In Europe the results of the witch hunts and housewifization of women was in the process of becoming entrenched within western capitalism. The witch hunt was a reaction of the new male-dominated classes against the rebellion of women. The poor women `freed', that is, expropriated from their means of subsistence and skills, fought back against their expropriators and when a woman denied being a witch and having anything to do with all the accusations, she was tortured and finally burnt at the stake (Mies, 1986). Hence, women had been separated from the public sphere, their work deemed unproductive and of no value to the production system. They had become dis-empowered and subjugated into the privacy of the home (ibid). Ania Malinowska « As the first wave concluded with the acknowledgment of women's right to vote, the second wave commenced after the postwar chaos and the atmosphere of the liquefaction of social roles to focus on women's work and family environment. Active from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the second wave asked questions about the constituents of gender roles and women's sexuality. Simone de Beauvoir's phrase «one is not born a woman but becomes one» (Beauvoir, 1949/1956, p. 273) served as a byword for the wave's effort toward relaxing the social idiom of femininity. The second wave was influenced by 148 poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. As such, it showed interest in the relationship between the structuring of womanhood (in social practice and media representation) and woman's lived experience. Key concepts at that time were Betty Freidan's feminine mystique (1963) and Laura Mulvey's male gaze (1975), and later Alice Walker's womanism (1983/2007) that introduced the ideas of the third wave. Also, notable forms of women's resistance were identified through the notions of écriture feminine (Cixous, 1976), gynocriticism (Showalter, 1979), and female fantasy (Coward, 1984; Radway, 1984/1991) to express the need for women's critical agency as well as self-aware, bottom-up representation of femininity» « As television became the defining medium for the second quarter of the 20th century, the second wave revolved around women's struggle for televisual presence. It was important for overcoming employment patterns and representation templates to provide a more balanced, equal, and reliable practice for both. From the very beginning, the male-dominated environment of television recreated the social func- tions of gender, mostly by eliminating women from authority positions, and reducing them to technical, organizational, administrative, or entertaining roles. Also, the number of women in television wavered unfavorably, which was best reflected by the gradual decline of women in television jobs from the 1960s to 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic. Data from British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) surveys in the last years of the 1980s showed a disproportionate balance of 5 women to 150 men in television-related jobs (Casey, Casey, Calvert, French, & Lewis, 2008). The disproportion relented in the 1990s, as supported by a number of legal regulations to reduce the financial and position-related misrepresentation of women in televisual structures. Also, various feminist groups (like the National Organization for Women) supported women's equal inclusion in the media scene. The Media Workshop, an organization founded by Florynce Kennedy in New York in 1966 encouraged a gender and race balanced contribution to mass publication and broadcasting. In 1968 in New York, Nanette Rainone started «Womankind» and «Electra Rewired» the first radio programs with a feminist lean, slanted exclusively toward women issues. A strong feminist media voice was Ms. magazine published in the United States as an insert in the New York magazine, and later as an independent journal of the Feminist Majority Foundation (an organization set up in 1984). The equal contribution to the media environment in America was monitored by the Media Report to Women journal. As of 1984, 149 the Council of Europe adopted a decree on the equality between women and men in the media. It was an effect of a strong feminist front outside America. 98» The second wave of feminism was viewed as a « modern project » which has treated subjects such as male dominance and the subject of masculin power in the political, professional and in the day-to-day life.» ««The number of never-married persons was highest in 1930 and lowest in 1980.228 By 1980, the level of permanently single people was as low or lower than in the antebellum era. 29 As a result, when second- wave feminism began in the early 1960s, it was a direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage. Single women played little, if any, role in the ideological vision of the most influential, liberal wing of the movement. In contrast to first-wave feminists who ultimately embraced political individualism through the quest for universal suffrage, liberal second-wave feminists made economic individualism the centerpiece of their reform efforts. Contemporary feminists insisted on improved access to education, equal rights in the workplace, and comparable access to government benefits and private credit. At the same time, liberal reformers presumed that women would marry and have children, forcing them to juggle a career and responsibilities at home. To enable women to have it all, second-wave feminists pressed for increased control over reproduction, maternity leave, and government support for child care. These policy initiatives often advanced the interests of single as well as married women. For instance, regardless of marital status, women benefited from antidiscrimination laws and the ability to make choices about reproduction. Despite these shared gains, single women remained a relatively invisible constituency systematically overshadowed by the "superwoman" with a career and a family. Some women rebelled against these traditional presumptions about women's lives, but their critiques tended to focus on the racially exclusionary impact or heterosexist implications of liberal feminist ideology. There was little or no discussion of singlehood as a forgotten category. » Thompson: «The most significant problem with this litany is that it does not recognize the centrality of the feminism of women of color in Second Wave history. Normative accounts of the Second Wave feminist movement often reach back to the publication of Betty Friedan's 98 Malinowska, Ania. «WAVES OF FEMINISM.» The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication , 2020. doi:10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc096. 150 The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, and the emergence of women's consciousness-raising (CR/ Consciousness raising groups) groups in the late 1960s. All signaled a rising number of white, middle-class women un- willing to be treated like second-class citizens in the boardroom, in education, or in bed. Many of the early protests waged by this sector of the feminist movement picked up on the courage and forthrightness of 196os' struggles-a willingness to stop traffic, break existing laws to pro- vide safe and accessible abortions, and contradict the older generation. For younger women, the leadership women had demonstrated in 196os' activism belied the sex roles that had traditionally defined domestic, economic, and political relations and opened new possibilities for action. This version of the origins of Second Wave history is not sufficient in telling the story of multiracial feminism. Although there were Black women involved with NOW from the outset and Black and Latina women who participated in CR groups, the feminist work of women of color also extended beyond women-only spaces. In fact, during the 1970s, women of color were involved on three fronts-working with white- dominated feminist groups; forming women's caucuses in existing mixed-gender organizations; and developing autonomous Black, Latina, Native American, and Asian feminist organization. Militant women of color and white women took stands against white supremacy and imperialism (both internal and external colonialism); envisioned revolution as a necessary outcome of political struggle; and saw armed propaganda (armed attacks against corporate and military targets along with public education about state crime) as a possible tactic in revolutionary struggle. Although some of these women avoided or rejected the term "feminist" because of its association with hegemonic feminism, these women still confronted sexism both within solidarity and nationalist organizations and within their own communities. In her autobiographical account of her late-196os' politics, Black liberation movement leader Assata Shakur writes: "To me, the revolutionary struggle of Black people had to be against racism, classism, imperialism and sexism for real freedom under a socialist government."" During this period, Angela Davis was also linking anti-capitalist struggle with the fight against race and gender oppression.99" Huffman : « While women of color and ethnicity had been notable activists and writers throughout both the first and second waves, they were truly the pioneers of the third wave in that they were the first to provide an extensive critique of second wave feminism from within 99 Thompson, Becky. « Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism ». Feminist Studies 28, no 2 (2002): 337-60. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178747. 151 the feminist movement. They were also the first to use the term "third wave" (Springer, 2002, 1063). In the 1980s, a new category of feminism thought- global feminism - was becoming a regular feature of the feminist discourse in the United States. Initially, this rather dubious category encompassed both theories and purely descriptive accounts of how relations between local and global processes affect women in different locations across the globe. While these writings were worthy endeavors, insufficient attention was given either to the range of political perspectives included or to what exactly was meant by global feminism. Over time, this perspective was give more theoretical coherency and political potency by the influence of feminist postcolonial theory eory (Minh-ha,1989 ; Spivak, 1990; Lewis and Mills, 2003).» Indeed, the anthologies by these young feminists include a plethora of such personal narratives about the contradictions, uncertainties, and dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Similarly, many of their zines are personal much like journals written to vent anger and frustration (Cashen, 2002, 17), Such personal narratives have been denigrated as too confessional, whiny or subjective by their critics (Pollit, 1999). Yet, while a careful review of this generation's writings suggests that they use a variety of forms ranging from the personal to the more theoretical, personal narratives and what Bordo has called less abstract "embodied theory" clearly predominate (1993, 184-185). Moreover, some of their more recent writings have made concerted efforts to more explicitly *use personal experience as a bridge to larger political and theoretical explorations of the third wave" (Dicker and Piepmeier, 2003, 13. This media-savvy generation has also used new technologies, such as the internet, desk-top publishing, and xeroxing, to expand the vennes for their voices (Alfonso and Trigilio, 1997). Zines in particular,have provided a form of interaction where *vouths are the initiators and producers of their own social agendas and representations .. an underground with no center, built of paper" (Cashen, 2002, 18). Another major strategy of these young feminists, which mirrors certain postmodernist and post-structuralist techniques such as deconstruction and the rejection of binary polarities, is their use of contradictions to expose the social construction of reality. Cashen describes how Riot Grrrls, a group who reclaimed space for women in punk rock, adopted a feminine "girlie" * king of dress juxtaposed with combat boots or words like "slut" written on their bodies to critique anddeflate the construction of the feminine (Cashen, 2002, 13-14). Indeed, many younger feminists celebrate contradictions as a means of resistance to identity of categorization, much in the spirit of performance theories and queer theorists. Here, embracing fluidity is seen as fostering diversity and exposing the categories of race, gender or sexuality as simply social constructions.» 152 Richardson: «The Internet rebooted visible, collective womanism in two phases.» « In the Web 1.0 paradigm, Black feminists experimented with their digital voices. Blogs such as Gina McCauley's What About Our Daughters (Rapp, Button, Fleury- Steiner, & Fleury-Steiner, 2010), K. Tempest Bradford's The Angry Black Woman (Curtis, 2015), and Brittney Cooper's Crunk Feminist Collective (Boylorn, 2013) quickly became required reading material for Black women in the early 2000s. In this fashion, the affordances of Web 1.0 rewarded individual, standout digital personalities with coveted access to traditional media, but did not yet offer a path to collective leveraging of the Internet for social movement formation. The Web 2.0, read/write version of the Internet shifted this focus--from singular womanist bloggers--to a plurality of connected Black feminists online. Shortly after Twitter's launch in 2006, African Americans began to visit the social media platform more than any other ethnic group. By 2014, more than 26% of African Americans were convening on Twitter at any given time of day, while only 16% of Whites were doing so (Smith, 2014). So-called « Black Twitter» (as it was dubbed by blogger Choire Sicha in 2009) comprised African American voices from all over the world. Initial academic explorations into Black Twitter found that African Americans were engaging in lively games of the « dozens» (Florini, 2014) or live-Tweeting hit television shows such as Shonda Rhimes's Scandal (Everett, 2015) or How to Get Away with Murder (Williams & Gonlin, 2017). The digital frivolity gave way to fury, however, after the Trayvon Martin murder trial in 2013. When George Zimmerman, who is half-White, was acquitted of killing the unarmed, Black teenager in Sanford, Florida, Alicia Garza took to Facebook to write a love letter to Black people. Her friend, Patrisse Cullors, reposted it to Twitter with a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter (Garza, 2016). Neither of the women said that they ever expected the Tweet to become a global movement. In many ways though, this moment may have been inevitable, since the socially conservative politics of respectability silenced many groups of willing Black women activists for decades.» Archer: One of the earliest pieces to articulate the simultaneous and non-hierarchical nature of oppressions was the Combahee River Collective's "Black Feminist Statement," published in 1978. This was followed in the 1980s by such classics as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith, 1982); This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983); Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Smith, 1983); and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks, 1984). Viewing themselves as "outsiders" within the feminist movement, these pioneers of the third wave created a feminism of their own (Lorde, 2000). Identity politics theory which has played a huge role in intersectional studies and gender studies, has therefore 153 shaped the term of intersectionality when Patricia Hill Collins used the term to identitfy different types of identities, stand points and social locations linked in a matrix of domination. «During the 1990s, this theory of simultaneous and multiple oppressions was rearticulated, largely as a result of the theoretical writings of Patricia Hill Collins. Collins moved from first calling this perspective Black feminist thought (1990) to renaming it intersectionality theory (Andersen and Collins, 1994; Collins, 1998) designation that enabled its theoretical and political assumptions to prevail over standpoint or identity. Collins also created a new feminist epistemology that has had a profound effect on feminist thought. Here she developed a social constructionist view of knowledge that linked identities, stand points and social locations in a matrix of domination. This challenge to the second wave was led by feminists who based their analyses on the works of French social thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, who argued that all group categories could and should be deconstructed as essentialist. As Judith Grant noted, groups based on difference - such as the working class or women of color- have no single voice or vision of reality, but rather are made up of people with heterogeneous experiences (Grant, 1993, 94).» «However, this movement has shifted due to the radical concepts of feminism and due to problematic political opinions that were on the rise in the 1980s «these feminist filmmaking collectives, distributors, and festivals, disappeared from the late 1980s onward, due to cuts and changes in funding both for and from arts organizations, broadcasters, and other public bodies enforced by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and abetted by the backlash against feminism in the rising neoconservative culture of the 1980s, which resulted in the waning of women's consciousness-raising groups, university women's studies programs, and women's community centers, which had been key constituents of the feminist film movement.» M. Bell Gaye Tuchman: «symbolic annihilation» this means that women are underrepresented or falsely represented in the media: «Gaye Tuchman (1978) developed the concept of Symbolic Annihilation to refer to the under-representation of women in a narrow range of social roles, while men were represented in a full range of social and occupational roles. Tuchman also argued that women's achievements were often not reported or trivialised and often seen as less important than things like their looks According to Tuchman, women were often represented in roles linked to gender stereotypes, particularly those related to housework and motherhood - a good example of this being washing powder advertisements in which mothers and small daughters are working together, while men and boys are the ones covered in mud. 154 Tuchman: «Since 1954, there has been relatively little change in the presentation of women according to the available statistical indicators.13 Then as now, only about 45 percen of the people presented on television have been women; about 20 pe cent of those shown as members of the labor force have been women. Men are shown as aggressors, women as victims. Symbolically subser- vient, policewomen who have been knocked to the floor by a bad guy are pulled from the floor by a good guy; in both cases, women are on the floor in relationship to men. Twenty-five years ago, as today, women on television were concentrated in the ghetto of situation comedy. They are and were, as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights put it, "window dress- ing on the set." That similarity between past and present is found elsewhere in the media. In the 1950s as now, the lives of women in women's magazine fiction have been defined in terms of men-husbands, lovers, or the chasm of male absence.14 Ads continue to portray women in the home and men outside it, although there are no systematic statistical comparisons of ads from twenty-five years ago with those of today.15 Voiceovers continue to be dominated by men; fewer than 10 percent use women's voices to announce station breaks, upcoming programs, and where to buy a product. To be sure, there appear to be some differences between yesterday's and today's media, particularly with regard to minorities. However, minority women, about 2.9 percent of the people on television, are con- centrated in family-centered situation comedies.17 But at least they now appear on television; in the early 1960s, the regular presence of a black woman on a prime-time show contributed to its cancellation. However, mere presence does not suffice. Lemon points out that on some shows men dominated women so much that the regular appearance of a female co-star seemed to increase white male dominance.18 Presence also en- ables the reiteration of stereotypes: Dominance patterns in interactions on prime-time television contrast the "black matriarch" with the less forceful position of the white woman within her family. And, the mass media so assume male superiority that men even give more advice about personal entanglements on the soap operas than women do. This finding seems particularly significant, because the soap operas come closer to presenting a pseudoegalitarian world than other television pro- grams and most other media.» Thompson: «Ferguson (1980) conducted a content analysis of women's magazines from the end of WWII to 1980 and found that representations were organised around what she called the cult of femininity, based on traditional, stereotypical female roles and values: caring for others, family, marriage, and concern for appearance. 155 Ferguson noted that teenage magazines aimed at girls did offer a broader range of female representations, but there was still a focus on him, home and looking good for him. » Brown: «In a research study on magazine viewing, (Stice, Spangler, and Agras, 2001), 219 female participants were randomly assigned to two groups. One group received subscriptions to fashion magazines for a period of 15 months. The other group did not receive the magazines over the same time period. They concluded "that exposure to thinideal images" may have longterm effects on young women. These researchers also noted that magazine consumption prompted an increase in women's body dissatisfaction and their desires to be thin. who suggest when women internalize images of thin female body images they can exhibit negative emotional responses and harmful behaviors. Tiggemann and Pickering (1996) administered questionnaires to 94 women to discover the effects television viewing had on body dissatisfaction and the desire to be thin. The study's findings support a societal link between body dissatisfaction and the types of television programs that are viewed by women. The researchers noted that viewing shows such as soaps or serials, music videos, or movies portraying women in stereotypical roles had an influence on women's negative levels of body dissatisfaction. » Thompson « « there was little coverage of women's sport, but what little coverage there was had a tendency to trivialise, sexualise and devalue women's sporting achievements. HOWEVER, this later example may be something that has changed considerably over the last decade.» « «Examples of where Disney reinforces female stereotypes include:
37% of crime series writers were women and 11% were women of color; the underrepresentation is responsible for «advancing distorted representations of crime, justice, race, and gender,» according to Color of Change » Pittman: « the experience of watching multiple episodes of a program in a single sitting. Because of advances in technology and the relatively low cost of unlimited bandwidth, more people are binge-watching their favorite television shows and movies than ever before, so much so that some suggest it is becoming the new norm (West, 2013). The year 2014 saw broadcast and cable television audiences decline and an increase in people turning to online streaming services to access entertainment content. With streaming video, viewers have the opportunity to watch multiple episodes of programs in a single sitting or an entire season over the course of a few days, a phenomenon known as binge-watching (Hirsen, 2015). » Prastein: «However, the phrase binge-watching has been embraced by the popular press, and the rapid growth and availability of streaming platforms have influenced this increasingly standard consumer behavior. The institutional rise of Netflix as not only a platform for viewing but also a producer of content has led to what is colloquially known as the «Netflix effect» 160 (Roxborough, 2014; Lehrer, 2014; Smith, 2014), and it has changed the way television is written, produced, and consumed. With almost 30 million subscribers, Netflix is among the leading providers of streaming media. Netflix is not only aware of the increase in binge-watching but seems to be encouraging (or at least facilitating) it as a viable consumptive activity. In 2013, it produced two original series -- the critically acclaimed House of Cards and a highly anticipated fourth season of Arrested Development -- and released every episode simultaneously. » Aguiar: «In January 2016, US-based Netflix--which had already been operating in multiple countries--announced an expansion to 243 countries. That is, Netflix secured the various rights to stream some combinations of the 14,450 movies and 2,200 television shows available in their platform into 243 different countries.3 The only major country outside the Netflix distribution zone is China. To put this another way, Netflix partly accomplished through business strategy an outcome that public policy had not heretofore made possible. The digital single market is controversial in Europe, and it is not clear when digital sellers in one EU country will be able to distribute to another. » Rubikon: «The dominant power of English language gives the portrayal of the consequences of globalization. From this, the spread of the English product to other countries has two impacts; first, English language with its power symbolizes higher status and higher economic advancement in which producers should concern to; second, the American life carried by English language is becoming more accepted as the global culture, which later leads to more profit to American corporations as well. The commodification of American life that leads to consumerism was developed by multinational corporations supported by an imperialist power and engaged in a more complex relationship with the economical, political, and military matter (Rowe, 2010). With the twenty-first century technology, the internet is expected to be the gate to a new cultural movement with unlimited space of communication and exchanges and Rowe saw it as an opportunity for new politics, diminishing hierarchies in modern society, and new cultural practices. Netflix, nevertheless, offers itself as the media for the dominant culture to define its consumers' demands to be the standard of global consumerism, illustrating the importance of English language to be the main requirement as a successful commodity. » Rubikon: «This application of Americanization shows the best form of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism done by Netflix is identified by the unequal flow of culture from the 161 dominant culture to the dominated, in which this American culture is strongly associated with the economic and political hegemony to spread the American consumerist ideology (Iwabuchi, 2002). This also shows the unequal relationship of America as the West and the others, where cultural domination of America and the exploitation of local culture by Americans happen. In the perspective of transnational culture, as Iwabuchi (2002) further explained about what Stuart Hall has termed as 'global mass culture' to characterize the global spread of culture, it seems that the global capitalist does want to absorb the cultural differences from all cultures within the concept of American to operate and dominate the world. This concept of hybridity of the local culture to the dominating culture implies how the local culture cannot be fully recognized or gain an influencing power without the help of Americanization. This is also in line with what Sklair has listed in the discussion of transnational company in the globalization, homogenization, and hybridization which is produced by globalization through transnational company is oriented on the capitalism merely for profit, while at the same time may destroy or sustain a certain culture as the 'side effect.' Thus, the participation of Netflix as the 'global TV network' itself fully plays the role of cultural imperiality; they control over the foreign market, foreign investment, and foreign participation as the main resource to the company, as well as creating a new market for them (Ritzer, 2011). What is being stressed in the controlling of the foreign culture's participation in the Netflix products is that the use of Americanization gives the producers more options, whether to put the foreign culture in the product or to modify the foreign culture to make it more appealing to the audiences » Vredenburg: «The term «woke» is of African-American origin, a «byword for social awareness» (Merriam-Webster 2017). Specifically, woke washing is defined as «brands [which] have unclear or indeterminate records of social cause practices» (Vredenburg et al., 2018) but yet are attempting «to market themselves as being concerned with issues of inequality and social injustice» (Sobande, 2019, p.18), highlighting inconsistencies between messaging and practice (Vredenburg et al., 2018). Overall, the typology provides a theoretical foundation for brand activism by identifying, defining, and distinguishing four types of brand activism. » Sobande: «The marketing of «woke» bravery, which involves brands invoking images and ideas that initially may appear allied with social justice sentiments, is a thorny and relatively recent topic of media coverage and academic enquiry. Brands and celebrities that are perceived to have appropriated social justice rhetoric and representations in pursuit of profit, have been critiqued: «How business and basic bitches killed `woke': whose slang is it anyway? (Guobadia, 2018), «The Problem With `Woke Bait' and Social Justice Propaganda» (Blanco, 2019), and «Justin Timberlake's Fake-Wokeness and Lack of Accountability Won't Fly in 162 2018» (Rolli, 2018). Contrastingly, certain commercial organisations, including US magazine Teen Vogue, have been praised and have benefited due to perceptions of their active efforts to raise awareness of systemic and intersecting inequalities (Keller, 2017).» Herbert: «Aspects like gender, race and class are mainly understood and deployed in individual terms. Both when used for marketing purposes (to appeal to individual consumers) and when individuals make judgments on the ethics of brands and/or public figures. It is also noticeable how sentiments expressed in the campaigns (such as the American Dream ideal) are echoed in the replies, further highlighting the impact that these marketing posts have on how the athletes are perceived by repliers. similar case studies could be conducted in the future to explore these kind of social media dynamics even further, especially considering that brands like Nike continually use social and political causes to «woke-wash» their brand image, with the protests against police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota being the latest example (Pasquarelli 2020). Brands are constantly finding ways to exploit social and political causes for marketing purposes, and future research could be valuable when it comes to uncovering and exploring how brand «woke-washing» evolves.» Washington Post: «Netflix lost subscribers during the same period and is now facing a slowing economy, inflation-strained households and rising interest rates that must be nerve-wracking for a company built atop a mountain of debt. Layoffs rapidly ensued, and corporate idealism has apparently been shown the door. That's exactly what should have been expected. Netflix is a business, not a charity. Denounce capitalist greed if you like, but of course that greed is really just businesses reflecting consumers back to themselves. Of course, it wasn't crazy to think that Netflix and its brethren might wield their power to change the minds of some in that audience. But that power was always going to be sharply limited by the economic needs of the business, which the left seems to be forgetting as it pressures companies to take the strongest possible stance on everything. There is no corporate shortcut to social change that sidesteps the need for politics and persuasion, because, faced with the choice, companies will always choose making money over making history.» Spangler: «Netflix shares plummeted to their lowest point since January 2018 as investors reacted to the streamer's first subscriber loss in more than a decade -- bringing years of booming growth to a screeching halt. 163 The stock closed down 35.1% on Wednesday, to $226.19 per share, marking Netflix's biggest one-day drop ever in percentage terms. The company shed $54.4 billion in market capitalization overnight, the largest single-day decline in its history. The second-biggest drop came in January, when it saw $49 billion in market cap shaved off after Q4 subscriber adds came up short and Netflix warned of slowing growth.» Colin : «A study from TVLine, which analyzes the favorite television characters of a mixed audience aged 18 to 34, shows that there is still a problem with minority representation regarding the population in the United States. Between 2015 and 2017, racial minorities have seen their representation in the population increase from 15% to 18%, yet, only one actor reaches the top 10. As regards LGBTQ+ characters, the figures increase from 7% in 2015 to 11% in 2017, but none of these characters are in the top 10. At last, the number of female characters has been decreasing : they represent 6 of the 25 most popular characters in 2017, compared to 10 in 2016, the first of them barely having made the top 10. At the same time, the US population shows a very different reality : 50.8% of women, 23.1% of people of color and 4.8% are members of the LGBTQ+ community. According to TVTime, in 2020, the diversification engaged in the previous years continues, while remaining far from reality. The top 10 includes only two women, these being the only LGBTQ+ characters on the top and the only person of color for one of them. Therefore, they both represent the categories mentioned above; these signs revealing their intersectionality. White : « Taking on Black Mirror's much-discussed episode «Nosedive,» in which members of a supposedly utopian society are given a rating out of five based on their social interactions, Jérémy Cornec's (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) line of analysis in «`You need up votes from quality people' : Représentations et discriminations dans `Nosedive' (Black Mirror, S0301, Octobre 2016)» examines representations of class, race and gender in this futuristic society, revealing the discrimination taking place in our own. His comments on the female characters in the episode echo many of the sentiments expressed by Sonia Abroud, notably the expectations of glamour and sociability placed upon women, as he explains how a fragile housewife stereotype is gradually valorised rather than enforced within the hierarchical society presented in the episode. With white, mostly blonde characters making up the desirable elite, Cornec outlines how director Joe Wright also uses colour to create visual discrimination. The aesthetically pleasing pastel colours used by Wright give the viewer the impression of seeing 164 «life through rose-tinted glasses,» as Cornec put it, which contrasts directly with the sombre and cold greens and blues used as backdrops for the unnamed black characters, who almost invariably find themselves at the bottom of the social ladder, usually in service roles, and denied social promotion. Reinforcing this conclusion, Cornec also compares two characters with the same rating--a lazy, cynical white man and a polite, hardworking black man: a quantifiable representation of white privilege. Florence Cabaret's (Université de Rouen Normandie) talk on «The Mindy Project (20122017) : une série qui défie l'intersectionnalité ?» presents both an intradiegetic and extradiegetic intersectional analysis, which begins by drawing our attention to the rare representation of an Indian-American woman in US sitcoms in Mindy Kaling, the show's creator, executive producer and lead actor. Kaling's show gives a certain behind-the-curtain glimpse at life as a woman belonging to an under-represented ethnic group in the US and the discrimination that this entails, but this, of course, goes along with the expectation of intersectional representation on the part of critics and viewers, as Cabaret highlights. Discussing these expectations, Cabaret also examines the show's awareness of its failure to meet them via its responses; for example, Mindy's statement «it's so weird being my own role model,» which also brings into question the character's flaws and her compatibility with the role model notion. Indeed, her character deliberately subverts the stereotypical representation of the South-Asian woman as reserved and having no love life, argues Cabaret, in order to use comedy to critique on another level, giving the example of Mindy's desire to be a white rom-com heroine when her character actually lives as liberal a lifestyle as any white American woman. In fact, one key part of Cabaret's thorough analysis focused on the episode «Mindy Lahiri is a White Man» (in which the character inhabits a white man's body), as she considers self-consciousness and the representation of otherness via linguistic idiosyncrasies and body language, as well as the «reconditioning» of women to succeed in a patriarchal society. » Baten: «In media, there are patterns of Black women being portrayed as masculine. Consider the way that media outlets have talked about Serena Williams and Michelle Obama. In movies and television, similar patterns appear. This may manifest as casting a Black woman or girl in minor roles where she is only a prop for a white main character's development, she is never thought of as a love interest, or her romantic life is a joke to other characters and the audience. In Pitch Perfect, Cynthia-Rose's sexuality and romantic relationships are made fun of constantly, and the jokes about her make up nearly her entire character. In Sex and the City, Jennifer Hudson's character, Louise, is more of a pitied character than a fully realized one. » 165 Sani : « The six-episode miniseries follows the comedic hardships and trials of English department chair Professor Ji-Yoon Kim at a prestigious university named Pembroke. The cast of «The Chair» is a coterie of brilliant performers and the co-creators of the show do not falter when it comes to their genius. Intersectionality comes to play in «The Chair» as gender and racial biases are frequently highlighted. It is a big deal for the first woman and person of color to be elected the chair of Pembroke's English department. This is referred to as a step in the right direction to which many more must follow suit. At the university, 87% of the faculty is white and, to the audience's amusement, Professor Kim's photograph has been used on the college brochures for half a decade as some sort of false stamp of diversity and inclusion. These facts alone speak volumes. Since mankind could call itself mankind, discrimination has inhibited the advancement of many. The road to success appears free of obstructions until a blockade of racism prevents you from moving forward or a barrier of sexism deters you from moving in specific directions. » Babe : « Some specific points of concern, Shim says, which emerged from watching the series, include the naked women painted and used as VIP room props, the apparent absence of women from positions of power, and the many female characters never afforded the privilege of being identified by their own names, referred to instead as a male character's ex-wife or mother. For Shim, what is particularly upsetting about Squid Game's renderings of violence against women, she says, is that they are incidental, intended to advance male storylines, as opposed to being instrumental to their own. One unsettling example of this, she says, is when a guard of the game mentions gang-raping the corpse of an eliminated female player -- after which point, this horrifying detail is never addressed again.» Connie: «Historically, women of color with little knowledge can blindly imitate the images of themselves as portrayed in mass media, which can be harmful to their self-esteem, contradictions of self-identification, and daily interactions with majority people. Media literacy is important in understanding how images of minority women are distorted to fit the dominant group's ideals and cultural relevance, which affect the identity of minority women.» A study that have been made on the representations of women of coloron the cover of eight selected magazines, 1) Good Housekeeping, 2) Cosmopolitan, 3) Glamor, 4) Vogue, 5) Redbook, 6) 166 Seventeen, 7) Teen Vogue and 8) Maxim, have shown that these women were hypersexualized and were being white washed to mask that they are women of color which creates serious harmful issues. «The findings revealed that of the 278 magazine covers reviewed, 52 covers displayed women of color. 90% percent on the magazine covers with WOC had hypersexual images, contextual cues, and content. The percentage on magazine covers with women of color with ethnic traits being masked by whiteness was also 90%. Twelve, magazine covers of the 52, displayed images of WOC portraying objectification attributes. About 42 percent of magazine covers with WOC portrayed intensified exoticism attribute. The percentage of Black/African Women on the cover of magazines was 4.7%, the percentage of Latinas on the cover of magazines was 11.9% and the percentage of Asian Women on the cover of magazines was 2.2% and there were no Native American women presented on the cover of any magazines reviewed.» Henderson: «There has been a shift in the portrayals of black women on TV shows over the generations (Goldman & Waymer, 2015). Even though some of the older, unflattering stereotypes are still evident in some TV shows today, the roles that black women are transitioning into have reflected positive advances. Studies in the recent past have examined the history of black women on television and the typical portrayals that have been attached to them (Smith-Shomade, 2002; Collins, 2005; Versluys & Codde, 2014; Goldman & Waymer, 2015). In addition to the history of some of the portrayals, research has addressed the effects that result from them (Smith-Shomade, 2002; Collins, 2005). Black women when TV started becoming more and more popular were represented as the caregiver who supported her man. «Representation of black women on television began to increase at the beginning of the 1980s (Smith-Shomade, 2002). The roles that black women acquired were often in supporting roles to white or black male leads (Goldman & Waymer, 2015). Throughout U.S. television history, three main stereotypes of black women that continuously appear are the Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Sapphire (Smith-Shomade, 2002; Collins, 2005; Versluys & Codde, 2014). The Mammy» stereotype can be traced back to before the Civil War. She is often seen as the contented domestic worker, meaning she is expected to be submissive to the white family or employer. Her physical appearance is seen as unattractive, and she usually is obese and dark-skinned. The mammy's main goal is to take care of her family and to be of service to her employers. The «Black Lady» role is the modernized Mammy and is used as a template for middle-class womanhood (Collins, 2005). This more modern role still has limiting characteristics. Unlike the mammy, she is allowed to use aggression, but only if 167 used to gain economic success or for the benefit of others. She is known to have more attractive physical traits and is seen as more professional than a content domestic worker. The Jezebel stereotype was invented to rationalize the concept of slavery by shifting the perspective of the sexual exploitation of black women by white slave-owners (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This stereotype put the focus on black women seducing white men and took away the focus of white men abusing black women (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This role in television portrays black women as being hypersexual, promiscuous, and sometimes labeled as gold diggers. The «Sapphire» is one of the most prominent negative black women stereotypes. She is seen as aggressive, sassy, and hostile. The sapphire's sassiness and rudeness contradict the feminine nature expected of women . Her skin is usually a darker skin tone, and she is known for mocking black men for what she considers to be their inadequacies. An example of this stereotype would be the character Pam, of the hit 90's TV show Martin. Versluys believes that this role was created to emphasize the superiority of the «white Victorian woman» by showing the contrast between the «uncivilized» loud black women, and the respectable morally behaved white women. Black women created their own portrayal of themselves, known as the strong black woman, with hopes to degrade the three previously discussed stereotypes that were created by whites (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This strong black woman portrayal on television is known to have self-sacrificial strength while providing unlimited support to friends and family. She does not depend on men financially and, therefore, can take care of herself, and her personality is focused on her positive traits (Versluys & Codde, 2014; Goldman & Waymer, 2015). Black women are seen, sometimes, playing roles that are successful or independent. The shows that aired in 2017, in particular, portrayed these women as more independent and as having their own successful careers rather than just being a housewife. For example Olivia Pope, Annalisa Ketting, and Mary Jane Paul each are successful in their fields. Nearly all the characters were portrayed as educated as well. When it comes to appearance, a slight positive shift can be seen among these more recent characters, given that some are embracing their natural hair, rather than wearing straight hair to follow dominant societal norms. There was one slight negative shift, nonetheless, and it was the two characters from 2017-aired shows that were being shown as «over sexualized. » Braxton: «booty-shaking sugar mammas» and black men as hypersexualized characters who are only there to fulfill a fantasy. «The Dec. 6 article blasted «Living Single» and other Fox comedies featuring largely black casts for following in the tradition of «Good Times» and 168 «That's My Mama» of turning minorities into racial stereotypes. The story said that «top black entertainers» felt that young black men on the shows were being portrayed as «oversexed wha's-up, man buffoons, and young black women as booty-shaking sugar mamas. In targeting «Living Single,» the article said, «This comedy . . . is supposed to be a black `Designing Women,' but it's got quadruple the sex drive and none of the smarts. Though all the roommates have college degrees and upscale jobs, they behave like man-crazed Fly Girls. The men fare no better: The pair who live next door like to drop in by announcing, `We hungry.' The rest of the hilarity runs to big-butt jokes, nappy-hair jokes, even long, er, male-member jokes. » TV statistics: «Black women (5.6%) are less likely than white women (8.7%) and other women of color (11.0%) to be shown in a romantic relationship, but more likely to be shown as having at least one sexual partner.» With the stereotypes of portraying women of color as seductive and attractive, «Black girls and women are more likely to be shown as attractive (48.5%) compared to other women of color (44.6%) or white women (41.6%). » Henderson: «The Mammy» stereotype can be traced back to before the Civil War. She is often seen as the contented domestic worker, meaning she is expected to be submissive to the white family or employer. Her physical appearance is seen as unattractive, and she usually is obese and dark-skinned. The mammy's main goal is to take care of her family and to be of service to her employers. The «Black Lady» role is the modernized Mammy and is used as a template for middle-class womanhood (Collins, 2005). This more modern role still has limiting characteristics. Unlike the mammy, she is allowed to use aggression, but only if used to gain economic success or for the benefit of others. She is known to have more attractive physical traits and is seen as more professional than a content domestic worker. The Jezebel stereotype was invented to rationalize the concept of slavery by shifting the perspective of the sexual exploitation of black women by white slave-owners (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This stereotype put the focus on black women seducing white men and took away the focus of white men abusing black women (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This role in television portrays black women as being hypersexual, promiscuous, and sometimes labeled as gold diggers. The «Sapphire» is one of the most prominent negative black women stereotypes. She is seen as aggressive, sassy, and hostile. The sapphire's sassiness and rudeness contradict the feminine nature expected of women . Her skin is usually a darker skin tone, and she is known for mocking black men for what she considers to be their inadequacies. An example of this stereotype would be the character Pam, of the hit 90's TV show Martin. Versluys believes that this role was created to 169 emphasize the superiority of the «white Victorian woman» by showing the contrast between the «uncivilized» loud black women, and the respectable morally behaved white women. Black women created their own portrayal of themselves, known as the strong black woman, with hopes to degrade the three previously discussed stereotypes that were created by whites (Versluys & Codde, 2014). This strong black woman portrayal on television is known to have self-sacrificial strength while providing unlimited support to friends and family. She does not depend on men financially and, therefore, can take care of herself, and her personality is focused on her positive traits (Versluys & Codde, 2014; Goldman & Waymer, 2015). » Wang: «Dressed in this kind of strange, exotic style, she dances on the stage, attracting a large audience. The white male leading character has seen her on the stage and is so attracted by her that he falls in love with her despite having a fiancée already. In the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1996), Michelle Yeoh played her role as not just the typical Bond girl but a Chinese secret agent with both brains and martial arts talent. Despite this, her role is cool, steely, ethereal, professional, and in control of her emotions.» which is explained by the cultural differences and the male/female domination «While the West perceived itself as dominating, progressive, strong, and rational, the East has been portrayed as submissive, backward, weak, and irrational, like the previous movies the paper has discussed. In this way, the West has given itself the role of the male, and assigned the East the traditional female, and so the West has taken it to assert itself over the weak, feminine East » Paner: «However, as discouraging as these stereotypes and the lack of representation of Asian-Americans in film may be, people are moving forward. Although current films still continue to bypass Asian actors in favor of white ones, Asian-American actors in the industry are speaking up about the unfairness. Hollywood, too, is slowly doing its part to cast ethnically correct actors for Asian roles--Disney's upcoming live action adaptation of Mulan has cast Chinese actress Liu Yifei as the titular protagonist. Other films are also beginning to break down boundaries, casting Asians in roles that they would not have been in fifty years ago. Hailee Steinfeld, who is part Filipino, stars in The Edge Of Seventeen (2016), a coming-of-age comedy drama film. Hayden Szeto stars opposite her as her love interest, Erwin Kim. Instead of being portrayed as a socially awkward, quiet loner, Erwin is given a more well-rounded role, and his character feels like a high schooler that just happens to be Asian. » 170 ThoughtCo: «Hollywood has also represented Arab women narrowly. For decades, women of Middle Eastern descent have been portrayed as scantily clad belly dancers and harem girls or as silent women shrouded in veils, similar to how Hollywood has portrayed Indigenous women as princesses or squaws. The belly dancer and veiled female sexualize Arab women. Veiled women and belly dancers are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, belly dancers code Arab culture as exotic and sexually available. ... On the other hand, the veil has figured both as a site of intrigue and as the ultimate symbol of oppression. Films such as "Aladdin" (2019), «Arabian Nights» (1942), and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (1944) are among a host of movies featuring Arab women as veiled dancers. » Francisco: «least desirable» among all races of men. «Asian, Latin and white men tend to give black women 1 to 1.5 stars less, while black men's ratings of black women are more consistent with their ratings of all races of women,» he wrote. The most highly-rated groups of women by men were those of Asian and Latin descent, with white women not far behind. » Henderson: «In her chapter, Anne Crémieux analyses how Orange Is the New Black, one of the most intersectional shows in American television history, has succeeded over the years to depart from some stereotypical representations of poor non-white female characters to become a vehicle for intersectional concerns, addressing social issues such as the privatization of the prisonindustrial complex or the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the US. » Chavez: «In episode three, «Lesbian Request Denied,» Piper receives her new bunk assignment. Piper's fellow inmates are a little surprised when she is assigned to the housing bunk that is referred to as «the ghettos,» which largely houses black inmates. The other inmates are surprised because typically the prisoners are put into housing depending on their race. Healy, the prison counselor, would have had to approve of Piper being sent to live in «the ghetto» housing unit. He doesn't seem uncomfortable placing her in a predominantly black housing unit, but he was strongly against housing her with a lesbian. In this instance, the counselor's fear of lesbian sexuality trumps his desire to conform to standard of racial segregation. While race impacts the space and location an inmate in the series occupies, it does not mean all inmates agree along racial lines, and the white inmates are subdivided into multiple groups. The groups are based on sexuality, social class, and prison occupation. the ghetto» Furthermore, the series largely focuses on Piper, a white woman, who is incarcerated at Litchfield. Piper's entry into the prison system sheds light on the problems facing the other 171 inmates, who are mostly inmates of color. This is problematic because Orange Is the New Black frames the narratives of women of color through the lens of a white inmate (Bogado, 2013). Piper's whiteness often makes her an outsider to most of the women in prison, yet during the series she is the person that brings issues the inmates experience to light. In film and television the white savior is a white character who comes in and saves a lower or working-class, often isolated person of color experiencing some problem (Hughey, 2014). Piper's white privilege allows her to tell the stories of women of color inmates without giving them a voice. In doing so she is portrayed as the white savior coming into prison and helping fix their problems for them. Piper is instrumental in telling the stories of the women she meets through her fiancé Larry on the outside. Piper's stories also help in the identification of some questionable actions with money at the prison involving staff cutting back programs for inmates and switching to generic medications. In representing Piper as a white savior the women of color in the series are portrayed as not having the ability to help themselves and must rely on Piper's whiteness to be the spokeswoman for their problems. » Zottola: «In this dialogue between two of the guards, Sophia is described using terms that dehumanise her, but while she is sexualized by the first speaker, the second almost expresses disgust at the idea of a sexual encounter with her. In fact, Pornstache defines her as `a whole different species' and later as a `cyborg pussy', evaluating this positively because it could be a synonym of perfection as her genitals were `made' and not natural. Additionally, Pornstache refers to her identity before transition implying that because she was able to experience being a man, she is more understanding of sexual pleasure for those who identify as such. Bennet chooses his words from a completely different semantic set and defines Sophia as `wild' and `freakydickey'. In this episode, the church inside the prison collapses and Pennsatucky explains that it is Sophia's fault. Because she is not human, but an abomination, God has punished them all for allowing her in the church. The non-human depiction is reinforced by the use of the pronoun it, generally used in reference to objects. In Italian, the noun is translated literally, but it is not reinforced by the pronoun as the sentence is rendered impersonal, thus the use of a specific pronoun is avoided. The last example in this section is taken from Season 3. In this part of the story, Sophia gets particularly close with Gloria given that both their children are around the same age and live nearby, but they end up having a fight in which Gloria argues to be a better mother because she is a `real mother'. » 172 Gender and society: «In the first season, Chang appears less than five minutes altogether. On one hand, she plays a role of comic relief. She sometimes acts silly, and other times appears impudent, especially with sexually explicit talk. On the other hand, she is characterized as distant from others, and stands on her own. Chang's flashback episode, with a not-so-subtle theme of invisibility, shows how she overcomes gender hierarchy but feels lonely as unable to realize the norm of heterosexual pairing. I had to wonder: Does this add another layer to this character? Or does this reinforce the trope of Asian American inability to connect with other people? » Hyphen magazine: ««But even these moments of nuance are full of clichés, a dichotomy perfectly encapsulated by the sixth episode of the season, which has the questionably offensive title «Ching Chong Chang.» The episode follows Chang's path to prison and forces the viewer to question traditional beauty standards and humanize the otherwise marginalized inmate, but it also involves Tae Kwon Do, even though Chang is revealed to be Chinese, and the illegal trade of rhino horns. Nonetheless, it's a huge step forward for Chang's insecurities to be placed front and center for the first time, and to even hear her speak in full sentences. » Van Rossem: «Introduced in OITNB's Season 4, the hijab-wearing Alison Abdullah (Amanda Stephen) is transferred to Litchfield after the prison's new for-profit owner decides to expand the number of inmates. As soon as she arrives and sets up her bunk, Alison exchanges harsh words with Black Cindy, a recent convert to Judaism. Not even five minutes into their introduction, Cindy starts joking about Islamic terrorism and Alison's brothers going on a jihad against the country. Alison responds with some disses directed toward Judaism, but as their friendship develops later on, these jokes are merely laughed off.' The same character is seen in season 5 being involved in a polygamourous marriage reflecting a stereotype that is heavily present against Arabs and muslims, without trying to counter this stereotype. «More troubling is Alison's backstory, which the show began to explore in Season 5. It's revealed that the show's only Muslim inmate was engaged in a polygamous marriage and grew jealous of the other wife. Although the Quran does allow Muslim men to take a maximum of four wives, with the rationale being that Islam spreads through the patriarch, the practice is hardly widespread, especially among Muslims residing in the U.S. According to one estimate, «less than 1 percent of American Muslims indulge in the practice. A recent study [5] found that 74% of the women had Type I FGM and 26% Type II. However, as most prevalence data are for adult women they reflect practices of decades ago. There are, however, indications that support for FGM is 173 diminishing and that the practice is declining. Once such decline has set in, it may progress rapidly. For instance, in 2013 UNICEF estimated the prevalence of FGM among women aged 14 through 49 in Egypt at 91% [6], but by 2016 the estimate had lowered to 87% [7, 8]. According to the 2014 EDHS 92% of ever married women between the ages of 15 and 49 were circumcised [9]. However, among 20-24-year-old ever married women it was only 87%, while among 35 to 49-year-olds it was 95%. El-Gibaly, Ibrahim, Mensch and Clark [10] also demonstrated that the prevalence of FGM among girls aged 10-19 is about 10 percentage points lower than among their mothers. » Graeme: «Set at the predominantly white Winchester University, a fictitious Ivy League college, Dear White People follows the experiences of several black students as they struggle to affirm their identities in the face of social injustice and racial discrimination. The trailer was heavily downvoted on YouTube and lambasted on Twitter, with conservative commenters arguing the series was divisive and promoting racial conflict (Blistein; Sieczkowski). Ironically, such a vitriolic response only validates Dear White People's core theme: that «America is not, nor has it ever been, a «post-racial society. Dear white people» meets the comment of her white boyfriend telling her what if someone came out with a show called `Dear Black People'? In which she responded that black people have struggled historically and therefore they have the right to criticize and to speak up. «In Dear White People, Sam combats the feelings of inadequacy she experiences as a light-skinned biracial woman by performing an exaggerated version of blackness to prove her identity to her peers. Ironically, despite Sam's shame at her mixed heritage, biracial individuals generally enjoy higher social status than monoracial black Americans based on their lighter skin tones (Fryberg et al. 92). » Schelenz: «The fact that this group sees itself as an enclosed group, as being set apart from other groups, becomes clear when Gabe asks Sam if he may accompany her to the «Black caucus.» Sam replies: «It's members only,» alluding to the membership in the group «people of color,» as there is no formal membership in the Black caucus [S1, E1; 10:20].[31] On the other hand, the characters in DWP experience being ascribed to a group based on features. When Sam's relationship to Gabe becomes public knowledge, Sam's friends initially react by distancing themselves from her. Sam justifies her choice by pointing out that she is only partially Black. Her friend Joelle Brooks reminds her that, merely because of her skin tone, society at large perceives her as a Black woman. It is therefore the perception of others that determines Sam's place (in terms of group belonging) in society. 174 In the series, the conflict between Black and White feminists is introduced by a conversation between Muffy Tuttle and Joelle during a recording for the radio show «Dear White People.» Muffy urges Joelle and Black women to become more vocal in their support for women's rights. She says: «You got to lean in,» alluding to a White, neoliberal stream of feminism represented by Sheryl Sandberg and her movement Lean In.[40] Joelle explains that she cannot express her feminism the same way Muffy can because Black women are still stigmatized as naturally angry. Joelle also laments the racism of White women's rights activists [S3, E2; 2:30ff.]. DWP does not fully apply intersectionality as a critical analysis and praxis. An intersectional analysis means making visible experiences of those who are most marginalized in society.[52] Especially as a critical praxis, intersectionality helps reflect whom we center in our works - whether they are academic works or film products. As a critique of power, intersectionality helps uncover discrimination not just within contained plots but enables us to make larger connections to the film industry, the choice of characters, and how their roles impact public perception. Intersectionality thus helps us formulate important questions: Why are Black women the main protagonists of the show but their experiences of violence do not find a spotlight in seasons 1-3? Whom does the series speak to by highlighting diverse experiences within the Black student community while also being a satire of student life? What potential for political action does the series generate in terms of identity politics? » Saouki: «The report found that the number of news shows with diverse talent increased to 71 in 2019, up 42% from 50 shows in 2017. During the same period, the supply of non-diverse shows rose 13% to 69. » |
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