Women Friendships Through the Lens of Imagined Femininity
What media sources guide our ideas of friendships, especially friendships among women? Who is teaching us how are women's friendships supposed to look like? How have the majority of male directors portrayed women's friendships in the past? In his text "Mass Culture as Woman", Hyussen brings out the fact that mass culture consumption has generally been associated with women whereas the so-called high, real, authentic art has been associated with men. Women have been shown to be the passive readers/consumers of inferior, subjective literature, and men as the creators of objective, scientific, authentic art. I want to focus on how this kind of association affects how male directors in power have generally portrayed women's friendships on-screen. The mainstream media is full of examples of platonic women friendships centered around the "surface-level" bonding over the mass culture of reading fashion magazines, "chick-lits", painting nails, going t