Feminism:

1.Gendered character of language:  Manpower; Master Bedroom; House of Lords? Enough said.

Also: The different ways men and women use language: Phonological, Grammatical, Pragmatic, Discourse (Anne Pauwel’s lecture)

2.Gendered division of labour within organisations: OFFICE: What sex is the  secretary?  What about the Managing Director?  COURTROOM: What sex is the court recorder?  What about  the judge? HOSPITAL:  What sex is the nurse? What about the surgeon? SCHOOL: What sex is the cookery teacher? What about the Design and Technology staff?

3.Gendered audience – the concept of female narratives (those driven by character and dialogue) and masculine narratives (those driven by plot and action.) Think EastEnders versus Die Hard.

Also: Remember the different ways audiences are targeted in lifestyle magazines aimed at the two genders. Both are arguably gendered templates for living. Both are driven by a heterosexual imperative. Women buy the magazine in order  to be like the ‘cover girls’ on their magazines. Men want to acquire the ‘girls’ on theirs.

NB: Revise the Different Types of Feminism recovered from the gone but not forgotten Filton College site.

Marxism:

1.     Ideological state apparatuses - I.S.A. Ideological State Apparatus = The Velvet Glove Education, The Church, The Media. The modern state attempts to work by consent rather than coercion, coercion is expensive, difficult, ineffective and worst of all ‘gives the game away’ by revealing the essential nature of social relations.

2. Coercion and consent – Dictatorship versus democracy.  See above.


3. False class consciousness - is a Marxist concept that some proletariat are misguided as to their own place in class structure. More specifically, it is the belief that within the structures of Capitalism, there is a disconnect between the real state of affairs and the way they phenomenally appear. (For instance in the wage contract.) An example of this would be commodity fetishism - that people only concentrate on the point of value at the point of exchange, e.g. that a shirt costs $15, and begin seeing the shirt itself as having inherent value, and not seeing the process of production that valorized value into the shirt.See BBC New article about the sentencing of the Baseball Cap muderers.
4. Hegemony -  is the dominance of one group over other groups without the use of force. The capacity of dominant classes to persuade subordinate ones to accept, adopt and interiorize the values and norms which the dominant classes have adopted and believe are right and proper.
5. Dominant ideology – The values, attitudes and opinions (about right and wrong; good and bad; societal norms of behaviour etc) held by the majority.

NB: Revise the Marxism notes copied from the gone but not forgotten Filton College site.

 

Post-colonialism:

1. Imagined communities - National cultures become “imagined communities”  (construction through narrative, invented traditions, stories of origin, symbols, etc) In modern times, the shopping Mall and the Mass Media provide the disparate members of a nation with shared values which gives them the illusion of group membership.

Benedict Anderson in his book “Imagined Communities” defines nationalism as a construction created in imagination by print media. "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members."  Moreover, "It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."

2. Constructions of ethnicity – You could focus on  the representation of black Americans in ‘Birth of a Nation’ (the lascivious female mulatto and sexually predatory black male for instance) – and see how that negative construction of race is evident in cultures as disparate as Australia (The policy of the State removing mixed-race children from their families) to Hollywood’s ubiquitous construction of the black woman  as a ‘crack ‘ho’ and the black man as a pimp or drug dealer.

 

3. Globalisation – the Coca-colonisation of the world?

The worldwide diffusion of dominant cultures through the global marketplace (Western and American cultures globalized through ownership of infrastructure and production), reading "globalization" as another case of  hegemony, cultural imperialism, or Americanization.

The newest development in the expansion of global capitalism. It is a new manifestation of an old system of market liberalism, only this time it is occurring on an international, rather than national level. Marked by the expansion of the size and power of multinational corporations.

4. Anti-Eurocentricism – it’s the reason the NEAB English Anthology now contains Poetry from other Cultures! In other words, the movement encouraged a shift away from the sole study of DWEMs (Dead White European Males –Shakespeare;  Dickens etc) and a recognition of the value of work produced by marginalised cultures.

NB: Revise the Post-Colonialism notes at the gone but not forgotten Filton College site.

Postmodernism:

1. Fragmentation - Beginning in the mid to late  20^th century society became increasingly diverse, pluralistic, and fragmentary. A concern of postmodernism is exploring that fragmentation.

For instance, the Postmodern approach to art rejects the distinction between 'low' and 'high' forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favours eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it.

The modern age was characterised by wholeness, the postmodern age by fragmentation.

2. Consumption – The modern age focused on production, the postmodern age on consumption.

 

3. Cultural implosion. Baudrillard argues in his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) that contemporary society has entered into a phase of implosion. He says that the old structures of class have vanished into what he describes as the void of the masses. The 'massification' of society has led to the old forms of analyzing society being abandoned.

According to Baudrillard, implosion manifests itself in three distinct modes:

·         The implosion of meaning – nihilism. The erosion of binary meaning-making structures. The polarity between good and evil; right and wrong etc, no longer exists.

·         The implosion of culture – Mass consumption of culture threatens that very culture. Been on a school  trip to the the British Museum lately? Visited the  Eiffel Tower or been dragged around the Louvre? Ever tried to go up to the observatory in the crown of the Statue of Liberty? These structures, cultural treasures, are directly threatened by "the mass." The weight of the mass threatens the structures; the incessant desire to touch and to manipulate everything threatens the cultural artefacts themselves.

·         The implosion of the social - The end of the social means the end of the military, health care, hospitals, the judicial system, indoor plumbing, electricity, roads, banks, schools, grocery stores …virtually everything that we know and depend upon for our well-being will be exterminated with the end of the social. There's only one word that accurately expresses what the implosion will mean to Western society: anarchy.

NB: Revise the Post-Modernism notes from the gone but not forgotten Filton College site.

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