Feminist Research in Media and Popular Culture 2022

TW: Marital Rape ---------- This week we read about the SlutWalk protests from the reading " SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism, and Media" by Kaitlynn Mendes. We discussed how one cannot directly hold the organizers of a movement/protest responsible for how it gets received or how it is perceived by the mainstream media. Since part of the meaning of the protest is created by its media coverage - how it gets shown by the media, how it gets reflected upon by different communities, etc. - you cannot predict all of that while planning a movement.   This reminded me of some of the attempts at making feminist films in Indian cinema (Bollywood specifically). The reactions of the censor board, and the audience, have not been exactly how the filmmakers had intended/anticipated. One movie, in particular, comes to mind - "Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016)".  This film presents us with portraits of four lower middle-class women from a small town in Bhopal who are connected through the

    This week we talked about "Modest Fashion" while discussing the paper "Wrapped in Meaning: Modest Fashion as Feminist Strategy (2019)" by  Tilna  Rosenberg. Amongst other things, here we discussed how political action can come to be reduced to clothes/consumption/fashion, resulting in an oversimplification of the structural oppression and power dynamics.  At the same time, it is important to understand how the meanings of fashion/clothing gets contextualized and  decontextualized  over time.     "Buy this cool progressive product from us -> you are a feminist now." This again goes back to the previous discussions about hegemonic reconfiguration from previous weeks – where it appears as if we have made progress but certainly have not.  "Let us put this woman in a fashionable red hoodie but also with a hijab in our Nike commercial to make a political statement" - What is this if not a prop to signify diversity? Is this what feminism wants to

This week we read "Top Girls? Young Women and Post-Feminist Symbolic Violence” (Chapter 3) in The Aftermath of Feminism. We talked about how a certain specific post-feminist narrative of success is sold to young women - something which simplifies the women's struggles and reduces them to one's individual shortcomings. It uses the trope of a 'top girl' to argue how women issues are finally solved now because certain (few) woman have managed to reach the higher positions of power. For example, the fact that female CEOs exist is a sign that 'women can do it all' and that 'women's issues have been addressed'. If they had not been, how would these women achieve all this success? So if you cannot achieve what you want, it is your fault. You are the one being lazy. To illustrate, I want to focus on this one advertisement (the like of which I have seen many on Indian media) about 'women empowerment'. (It is about 3 mins of ad but you don't

This week we talked about how one could bring together insights from post-feminism, new traditionalism, and ideology of choice while reading Probyn's text "New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism (1997)". We discussed how post-feminist modern women end up being stuck in a "double shift" in the name of modernity. The double shift here being the hours of working outside in an office (in the name of being a 'modern, independent woman') and also the house of still having to take care of the house (because the underlying gender roles don't really change). This results in women always running against time, always in a hurry, and always in a state of lack of time. The definition of 'modern woman' somehow comes to expect women to 'take care of it all' on their own without having to ask for any help - the more self-sufficient they are, the more modern they are. All of it resulting in not having enough time. When we talk of the lack of time in th

  This week we discussed how pop culture and politics are distinguished in Zoonen’s text “Defamations: Politics as Soap Opera”. Here, we talked about politics and soap operas are seen to be inherently gendered; the former being the space for “the rational, masculine, important, logic, etc.” discourse and the latter being the space of “the emotional, the unnecessary, entertainment, feminine.” This took me back to the intentionally spiced-up stories I read as a kid in Indian newspapers. It specifically made me think about the stories I have heard about different women politicians in the Indian newspapers and the language used to frame these stories. These women are expected to “act like men” in order to be seen as a good politician. I want to focus on two aspects in which the women politicians are de-sexualised, i.e., removed from their “feminine” qualities in order to be seen as more fitting for the political “masculine” roles. They are supposed to give up their gender and act “neutrall

  This week we read about Rachel Alicia Griffin’s (2015) article about the representations of Black women (specifically the figures of mammy and the jezebel) in the TV show Scandal . The representations of women are shown as the two extremes: one of them being the all-loving, caring, and self-sacrificial; and the other being the ‘witchy’, villain-like, seductive qualities.  This reminds me of the kind of representations of women I grew up with while watching Indian soap operas and Bollywood films from the 90s. Immediately, two specific representations come to mind: “the good housewife” and “bad outsider woman”. There has always been a divide between a "good housewife" who is shown to be traditional, quiet, and shy - through her attire and mannerisms. She follows what her husband says and serving the family is the focus of her life. On the other hand, there is "an outsider woman" who's shown to be seductive, modernised, independent, and rebelling against traditio