Unit 7 Film and Gender资料文件与下载

    Feminism describes both the broad movement that has campaigned against the political and social inequalities between men and women and the school of academic criticism that takes gender inequality as its object of study. Feminists all critique the subordination of women to men, but they differ widely in their strategies for empowering women. Feminists accounts of the role of culture in gender inequality have been central to the development of cultural studies.

    A crude periodization of feminism might identify three phases: first-wave, second-wave and postmodern feminism. First-wave feminism describes the women’s movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While it contained many different political strands, first-wave feminists generally accepted a fundamental, natural difference between men and women, but argued for their political equality. The best-known campaign of first-wave feminism was for women’s suffrage. Second-wave feminism describes the women’s movement from the 1960s on. This period has seen an enormous growth in feminist scholarship, which has employed various forms of understanding inequality. An early concept used was patriarchy. This was originally an anthropological term which describes a social system which older men are entitled to exercise socially sanctioned authority over other members of the household or kinship group, both women and younger men. However, this term has been criticized subsequently, because it does not discriminate between the different forms of inequality manifested in different cultures. An alternative concept, proposed by Gayle Rubin, was the sex/gender system. This makes use of an important distinction between sex and gender where sex describers biological or natural differences, while gender describes the social roles of masculinity and femininity. Rubin argued that different societies assign different kinds of roles based on biological differences. The object of feminist inquiry should then be the kinds of cultural expectations that investigation that these roles presume. Research into gender identity has taken many different paths in the investigation of how gender is socially constructed. One influential strand has been post-structurist, psychoanalytic feminism. This argues that gender identity is constructed through language. In Western culture, language is phallogocentric, or male centerd. Because they are excluded from full access to language, women are refused entrance to a universalizing male dominance. More recently, postmodernist feminism has queried the sex/gender distinction. Judith Butler has suggested that it is a mistake to assume that there is a foundational, natural sex upon which gender identity is constructed. Instead, she argues that sex itself is socially constructed. To use a useful metaphor employed by Linda Nicholson, we use the body as a coat rack to hand our cultural assumptions about sexual differences. For example, women’s bodies are soft, passive and yielding, men’s are hard, active and forceful. Butler’s argument usefully problematizes the idea that sex comes first and that gender is somehow created from it. While no one argues that there are not physical differences between men and women, Butler directs the spotlight back onto the question of how culture interprets those differences. As white academic feminism has been challenged by the diverse strands of the women’s movement worldwide, the question of cultural difference and the relationships between gender, “race”, sexuality and class have moved to center-stage in feminist theory. However, there is a continuing and productive tension between this emphasis on difference and feminists’ desire to assert a collective identity to combat the abiding social inequalities between men and women.   

    Excerpt from Elaine Baldwin Introducing Cultural Studies (2005)