Cultural Sexism

How does gendered power work? How does it circulate? How does it become embedded? And most importantly, how can we challenge it? Heather Savigny highlights five key traits of cultural sexism – violence, silencing, disciplining, meritocracy and masculinity – prevalent across the media, entertainment and cultural industries that keep sexist values firmly within popular consciousness. She traces the development of key feminist thinkers before demonstrating how the normalization of misogyny in popular media, culture, news and politics perpetuates patriarchal values within our everyday social and cultural landscape. She argues that we need to understand why #MeToo was necessary in the first place in order to bring about impactful, lasting and meaningful change.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.

Whether or not we like to admit it, pop culture is a lens through which we alternately view and shape the world around us. When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture, author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond. With a comprehensive overview of the intertwining relationship between women and pop culture, this book is an ideal introduction to discussing feminism and daily life.

Harmful, culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood constrains women's self-determination. Gender in the Mirror proposes alternative imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood and advances an account of feminist discursive politics that takes on the challenge of neutralizing patriarchal imagery.

While some have argued that we live in a ‘postfeminist’ era that renders feminism irrelevant to people’s contemporary lives this book takes ‘feminism’, the source of eternal debate, contestation and ambivalence, and situates the term within the popular, cultural practices of everyday life. It explores the intimate connections between the politics of feminism and the representational practices of contemporary popular culture, examining how feminism is ‘made sensible’ through visual imagery and popular culture representations. It investigates how popular culture is produced, represented and consumed to reproduce the conditions in which feminism is valued or dismissed, and asks whether antifeminism exists in commodity form and is commercially viable. Written in an accessible style and analysing a broad range of popular culture artefacts (including commercial advertising, printed and digital news-related journalism and commentary, music, film, television programming, websites and social media), this book will be of use to students, researchers and practitioners of International Relations, International Political Economy and gender, cultural and media studies.

This volume examines the phenomenon of laddishness and the cult of the girlie in film, TV, advertising, music, politics, literature and society. It interprets these trends as a nostalgic longing for a pre-feminist society which, through the medium of comedy and irony, has been manipulated by popular media as a liberation from political correctness. Contrasting the culture icons of the 1990s with the 1970s tough chicks and the 1980s New Man and Have-It-All Woman, the book aims to show how the rhetoric of laddism emerged and how it has infused so many aspects of our cultural identity.

In a series of essays scrutinizing feminist and post-structuralists positions, Tania Modleski examines "the myth of postfeminism" and its operation in popular culture, especially popular film and cultural studies. (First published in 1991.)

In this accessible introductory guide, the author identifies key feminist approaches to popular culture from the 1960s to the present and demonstrates how the relationship between feminism, femininity and popular culture has often been a troubled one. The book introduces the central ideas of both second-wave feminism and feminist cultural studies and demonstrates how they inform feminist debates about a range of popular forms and practices through a series of case studies: the woman's film; romantic fiction; soap opera; consumption and material culture; fashion and beauty practices; and youth culture and popular music.