#guerrilagirls

E aí, miga, foi ?

Nathan Nkhoma

COM 4450/Borden

Thursday, November 29th 2012

Ideological Criticism of Movies and Television with help from a Feminist poster

            The SEARCH tool is very interesting to me. The letters stand for Sex, Environment, Age, Religion, Race, Class and Handicap. These are the different categories of identities that are privileged or disadvantages by the media. In this essay I will be focusing on sex and the role of the movies and television in perpetuating dominant ideas of the social roles of women in America today. Before I continue I will explain what I mean by dominant ideas: these are ideas about our reality that work in favor of the dominant group in our society. In America’s case, the dominant group is the white men. Movies and TV shows themselves support this argument with its majority of texts starring male characters as the key figure the audience is suppose to identify with. 

          I argue that current Movies and Television programs work in favor of the dominant group to pass down dominant ideas of how Women are seen in the American Society today.

          The ideologies that are passed down to the masses of Americans are strong because of the power of the television screen. Ideologies are beliefs and feelings about reality that people accept as common sense. In my experience, there is nothing else that provides the human mind with vivid imagery that can create beliefs in our minds. For example pornography is able to give one the idea of sexual intercourse prior to ever having actually experienced the act. Movies and television play a very powerful role for the dominant group also because they can be widely consumed. I understand stereotypes as preloaded images that people have of unfamiliar objects. By this I mean that, stereotypes become engraved into our minds as how we should see reality.  Stereotypes work the same as recollection, although the information is experienced by passively watching a screen.  

           The feminist poster by the Guerilla Girls is a perfect example of counter-hegemony towards the symbolic annihilation of women on the big screen. Counter-hegemony is simply the opposing of the dominant ideologies by a minority group. Symbolic annihilation is under-representing of certain groups of people in the media. The feminist movement, Guerilla Girls, has been challenging these social roles since their beginnings. My experience supports their cause because I was raised by a single mother thus I have witnessed the strength of women in our society. To my experience, women are not just an object to look at. My mother was the head of the house hold, which made the idea of a male authority a little hard to understand. Women have always been under-represented in the media. For as long as I can remember movies and TV shows have always presented women to be subordinate to men. 

            The Feminist movie poster is entitled ‘The Birth of feminism, Equality Now.’ The poster makes fun of how today’s Hollywood would present the feminist movements’ story to the public. The poster features three well know actresses, Pamela Andersen, Halle Berry and Catherine Zeta-Jones playing the roles of the feminist movements early leaders. The actresses on the poster are wearing bathing suits. Now if this movie was really being made, the images of the women in bathing suits would make the subject of feminism very diluted. I wouldn’t take the movies subject seriously because of the sex appeal that is used in the poster. The bathing suits symbolically annihilate the issue of the birth of feminism.

            The poster invites us to look at the female body which shows the dominant discourse of women being nothing but an object to look at. Discourses are frameworks that communicate and naturalize ideologies.  Movies and TV work very well at constantly promoting women as objects of the eye, which in term makes women less of an authority on any serious issue. The posters subtitle says; ‘They made women’s rights look really good, really good’ shows how othering works towards women. Othering is when one makes others seem less important or credible. The subtitle suggests that the feminist movement didn’t make a different in society but they did make fighting for women’s rights look really good. In favor of the dominant ideology, othering works well at creating ideas of those that are not part of the dominant group.

             The main binary opposition of the poster is women as active members of society vs. women as trophies and object of visual pleasure for audiences. The poster also expresses the incorporation of ideas of women since the beginning of the feminist movement. Incorporation is when the media defuses opposing ideas by making them part of the dominant ideology. The three women in the poster are holding a banner that says: “Equality Now!” This shows how the fight for equality has not ended. Although women are able to vote, work and own property, incorporation has still managed to defuse the issue of equality. There are more women on the screen today, but their roles as leading independent characters are few. Many films today still maintain the dominant ideologies of the patriarchal society we live in today by presenting women as eye-candy. For example, the movie Transformers features Megan Fox as Sam’s girlfriend. Her character is poorly developed but is very attractive. It is as if her acting talent means nothing but her looks mean everything.     

              The media make sense of the world for us, and the ways things are is what we as a society have accepted without understanding the ideologies we have taken on as our own. The poster also causes self-surveillance because the idea of an attractive actress is an idea that even I unconsciously come to expect. Self-surveillance is the self-awareness that is caused by a media text. Attractiveness has become a standard of Hollywood today. The dominant ideologies have created a standard and maintained it through the consent of the mass audiences.

            Dominant ideologies have power within a society. Dominant ideologies are world views of the ruling class that are also shared by the masses of people in a society. Outside of the media there is a lot of evidence of people conforming to the dominant ideology. This is why I find the feminist movement very intriguing because they have continued to inspire people through, guerilla marketing, to challenge the social roles that are created by the movies and TV.    

           Ideological Analysis has been very useful for analyzing this poster. Ideological analysis focuses on how the media enshrines and contradicts ideologies. I find ideological analysis of media texts very useful for understanding certain ideas that are constructed by the media.  This type of media analysis gives me a deeper understanding of what and whose ideas are being supported by the different media texts I consume. And as a media producer, this type of analysis gives me the ability to be more attentive at the ideas I perpetuate.