OUGD401 - Interim Crit

OUGD401 - Interim Crit

For our interim crit, we discussed the topics and questions and which we were going to go ahead with. As I was between either the gender representation topic and political/social change, after discussion, I decided to go ahead with looking at gender representation. This topic is very interesting to me and I think it has a significant importance. So much has changed in society since the Second World War. White middle-class women in the Western world are now aware that they have more options than to try and be a housewife and mother (with or without a part-time job). Non-White and working-class women are less punished for being ambitious beyond what used to be their social status. Men know how to change a diaper. Machines take care of cleaning dishes and clothes. This changed view of women’s role and social position, in place since the nineteenth century for middle and upper-class households, is marked by Friedan’s famous book The Feminine Mystique (1963).
Women however, have always tended to suffer from a narrow set of representations in the media. Although now, women are no longer related to such a degree of domestic housewives or mothers, there is still an extreme hyper-sexalised representation of women. Defining women as sex objects has become a leading representation in todays media, and this is still the case. There is such a broad range of examples of gender representations in the media and how this has constructed our ideas of gender, therefore this is something I am very passionate about and feel it is the right question to explore and research in such depth.