Feminist Approach and Television Communications & Media Essay

Feminist Approach and Television Name Institutional Affiliation Date
The different forms of media play a great role in the society. There are also various perspectives that provide an understanding of the various media channels about the various aspects of society. Such theoretical approaches include the Marxist approach, organizational approach, rhetorical, cultural, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, reception sociological and ecological analysis. Feminist theoretical perspective has been used to study the various media channels. One of the media channels that it has been used to study is television. The feminist theoretical approach has also been shaped by some factors along the way. The factors that have affected the feminism approach to television study are socio-historical, political and cultural. The different technological changes that are taking place in the media industry have also affected the approach in different ways. Understanding these ways will play a great role in understanding not only feminism approach, but also the other approaches and how external factors influence them. The paper seeks to provide a critique of the feminist approach and how it has been shaped by the socio-historical, political and cultural contexts and the changes in technology.
Feminist arose in North America and Europe when there were efforts made by the various activists on the liberation of women from the socio-cultural perspectives of the society that were holding them down. According to Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci and Lynn Spigel, television feminism was defined as ‘a call to action growing out of the deep conviction that women’s oppression was very much related to mass media representations and that change was not only urgent but possible’ CITATION Dow96 \l 1033 (Dow, 1996). By raising awareness on the various ways in which women were oppressed by the media, the feminists believed that people would begin evaluating processes and practices that hindered the development of the women culture. There were also various studies that were carried out during this time where some scholars argued that indeed gender was something that was socially constructed rather than a state of being as it was conditioned by biology — one of such scholars as Judith Butler, who argued that indeed gender was something that was socially constructed and it was subject to regulatory norms that affected how the aspect of gender was produced and circulated by television CITATION Van91 \l 1033 (Van, 1991).
The British cultural Studies also played a great role in understanding the relationship between feminism and television. The British cultural studies were as a result of the post-structuralistic approaches such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. The cultural study intervention in the feminist studies of television made it easy to come up with new approaches to research such as empirical and ethnographic studies in the media industry. The studies discussed how media programs such as soap operas affected the viewing experience of the gender specifically the female gender. The studies that were conducted showed that the television played a great role in shaping feminist through various programs that were aired at specific times. Such...