Course Description

At the core of the course is the question how feminism has become a demonized and ridiculed “F-word” in an age when issues of gender and sexuality are at the center of constant, often explosive political debates. These debates often connect media representation and political representation but tend to do so in simplistic ways that bypass or distort decades of sophisticated feminist theory and practice. We will trace back such representations through the decades around case studies that encompass film, video, television and new media practices. The case studies come from the United States and beyond, taking into full account the global interconnectedness of media production and consumption as well as the transnational travel of feminist ideas. The main goal of the course is to evaluate how useful feminist thinking is to understanding the relays between media and political representation; and to develop a lasting critical apparatus to analyzing the politics of gender and sexuality in the media.


Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Fractured Internet and Feminism

When reading that women are targeted as consumers and online-shoppers in the van Zoonen article, I immediately reflected back to a Political Science class I took a couple semesters ago called Campaign Messaging taught by Dan Schnur, the director of the Unruh Institute of Politics and a former political / campaign strategist. In the class we had to outline different messaging plans for political campaigns. When discussing social media as a political tool, the obvious sites were brought up (facebook, twitter, etc.), but the website Pinterest was discussed specifically as a way to target female voters. The reasoning behind this was because it is geared primarily as a site of consumerism.

I have a Pinterest account. I love it. No I do not have a wedding board. I did, however, log on and browse through the different users, only to find that it is indeed mostly occupied by female users. Putting the website into the context of post-feminism, which internet itself supports because of its potential of space--welcome to anyone, I find that it doesn't support the idea of women having a "choice" between remaining at home or joining the working class. There are boards for arts and crafts, cooking, photography, fashion, hair and beauty, and the infamous wedding board. In a way, the site tries to reduce the lives of women to various objects. Women pin the objects they like or desire and so are fueled into a consumer craze. Many a time have I repinned a new pair of shoes and then gone out that weekend to buy a pair in the same style.

Where does that leave feminism in the scope of the internet, then? If even politicians have gotten wind of the transferal of the female as TV consumer to Internet consumer, is there any hope for a female space untainted by patriarchal paradigms? The website Vitamin W comes to mind, which is another bookmark tab on my screen. The sites own description is as follows:

 VITAMIN W is a women-owned media platform delivering thoughtful news for professional women, from entrepreneurship to politics to sports, health, interviews, editorials, and more.

Wait a minute. Professional women? What about the women who remain at home? Are they relegated to Pinterest forevermore? Perhaps the internet is even more divided than we would have it believe, as Juhasz and Banet-Weiser discuss when they say feminism through the internet has become an individual venture. The internet has become, I suspect, as fractured as feminism continues to become. The only way for feminism to thrive, Juhasz and Banet-Weiser note, is through communal efforts.

-Victoria Hallebo
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