Women and videogames

Part 1: Background reading on Gamergate

Read this Guardian article on Gamergate 10 years on. Answer the following questions:

1) What was Gamergate? 

A game developers ex boyfriend accused her of trading sex for good reviews of her indie game.

2) What is the recent controversy surrounding narrative design studio Sweet Baby Inc? 

They are being accused of changing ethnicities, bodies and sexualities to conform to a 'woke' ideology.

3) What does the article conclude regarding diversity in videogames?

Nobody is forcing diversity into games but it is appearing naturally as its audience becomes more diverse.

Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet

Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets) or here using your Greenford Google login. Find Media Factsheet #169 Further Feminist Theory, read the whole of the Factsheet and answer the following questions:

1) What definitions are offered by the factsheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?

A movement which which aims for equality for women - to be treated as equal to men socially, economically and politically.

2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?

She identified a lack of diversity within the feminist movement and that they have been marginalised further. For example rich white women have more power than women of colour from less wealthy backgrounds.

3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?

She argues that the goal of feminism is flawed and that making women equal to men is oppressive towards women and not all men are equal to men as a result of sexuality or ethnicity.

4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?

It is the idea of overlapping social identities which can lead to the amount of discrimination they face or the power that they have. She argues that poor black women have more in common with poor black men than rich white women and that we cant only consider gender when talking about oppression.

5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?

She said that feminist research had not been conducted in the field of media and that the mass media leads to much of the things we associate with gender identity.

6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?

Society creates ideas about what is masculine or feminine through the media which links to Judith Butlers idea on how gender is a performance and is something we act based on what we are told is the right way to be.

7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?

They often exaggerate femininity in order to pull women into this consumer culture and feed them the ideas that they need certain things to be more womanly. The media use to be showing women how to act but now it offers a much more mediated identity depending on where you look.

8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?

Hall suggests that meanings are not fixed and represent the social, historical and cultural contexts of the time. You can see an example of this in advertising where usually in cleaning adverts now you can see a mix of both men and women whereas before you would only see the women cleaning.

9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?

• Whether the institution is commercial or public

• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)

• Genre (drama versus news)

• Target audiences

• The place the media text holds within the audiences’ daily lives

10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?

Mulvey male gaze - If the target audience is a male audience they may lean into the male gaze idea to attract a wide audience.

Stuart Hall - Negotiated, Hegemonic and oppositional readings.

11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?

Halls process of decoding and encoding which says that media texts are encoded with the hegemonic ideologies but then the audience decode these and often accept the hegemonic reading as it is so normalised.

Hypodermic needle model suggests that audiences are passive and take in the representations they see in the media without questioning them.

12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?

bell hooks also suggests that power cannot be explained by only genders but you have to take into account ethnicity, race, class and sexuality.