DMCT - Week 6

Feminist social theory has had an indelible impact on media theory since Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1975. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Mulvey argues that narrative film perpetually establishes the "male gaze," constructing women as always "bearer of meaning" rather than creator. This problematic means that viewers of film are perpetually assaulting the female by watching her on screen and females in film rarely achieve agency or importance. However, Mulvey's argument has come under critique by third-wave feminists because it disregards the homosexual gaze and the oppositional reading by the audience. Nevertheless, it stands as important intervention by feminists in the realm of media analysis.

Mulvey's insights into film proved influential for a multitude of scholars, but other feminist interventions may prove to be still more important for insights in digital media. Toffoletti provides a nice little breakdown of the history of feminist discussions of technology. She specifically looks at the role of Heidegger's concept of gestell (enframing) in how we understand our relationship with technology. Specifically, gestell destroys notions that humans are differnet from nature and their surroundings, including technology. Thus, almost everybody is in some sense engaged with technology at all times. We are all cyborgs; combinations of human and technology. This destruction of traditional binaries such as human/nature and human/technology is a feminist move because it exposes the constructed nature of these distinctions; distinctions constructed by patriarchy.