Titu 1

Student: Cristian Titu

Teacher: Ileana Jitaru
Class: Mass Media Studies
The Power of the Image
20th century Western feminism characteristics:
-approaches to organization and action, campaigns around legislation and direct action on peace
and disarmament
-the division of labor in the household, men-women relations, emotions, sexuality
The feminists think that politics and knowledge are interdependent where each one has
regenerated the other, and knowledge is self-consciously produced alongside political activity.
Even so, the relational may not be always harmonious.
Knowledge is the mechanism that helps us understand womens lives and all the other
third parties that influence these lives in various ways that constructed women as other. For the
feminist movement to survive the womens studies needs an institutional space to develop in
direct relation with the womens movement.
The feminist movement has always been interested in images, meanings, and
representations, especially in challenging these, which while questionable or offensive from a
feminist point of view, are from other points of view perfectly acceptable. For instance, the Miss
America contest introduced a stereotypical womanhood image that set the idea that all women
are reducible to a set of bodily attributes.

Titu 2

Knowledge does not come from nowhere, but it is generated through the desire of
feminist politics.
During 1960s, the feminist movement coincided with the Marxist ideology and its
thought on the superstructure ideas, culture and the place and effectivity of the superstructure
within the social formation.
1970s Ways of Seeing by John Berger. A BBC Television considering how images
make meaning. The images were considered commodities artifacts which are bought and sold,
which have exchange value. The most intriguing image was the one of the female nude, both in
the European high art tradition and in mass-produced pinup photographs. The analysis was
oriented to the relationship between images and their consumers, who are both spectators and
owners of the images as well.
Another idea talks about the fact that human beings are constructed by ideology and that
everything we think about the world and we do within it became so naturalized that we take it for
granted. Barthes suggested that meanings are not self-talking but that the meanings are produced
via codes at work in representations, and even if they appear to be natural they are produced via
signification at work.
Psychoanalysis introduced the idea of subjectivity, trying to present how this human
subjectivity is formed. The spectator is now subject addressed, positioned, and even formed by
representations.
The non-feminist or pre-feminist thinking seem to have something in common with the
feminist concerns (images, meanings, ideologies), objectives (analysis, deconstruction) but still,
the feminist movement has entered the field of representation on its own right.

Titu 3

The book tries to present us how the images of women in our society influence through
representation the spectators. In other words what is the relation between the ones that are
looking at certain women pictures and the actual images. The images have value of exchange
circulating as commodities in our society, but they also have a value of use, determined by the
context in which they are seen and analysed.
The images and the movies themselves have no meanings, but the meanings are
circulated between representation, spectator and social formation. Otherwise said, the meanings
may be different from one spectator to another according to their personal social formation.
There are some culturally dominant texts/images, from which there are the Hollywood
films and soft-core pornography, striving to take a place into the hegemonic high art institutions,
while they are produced for mass audiences.
The activity of deconstruction or analysis makes some people see through the transparent
meanings which texts offer us all. Some would ask themselves what is the point in analyzing
these cultural dominant images and now create some alternatives. The answer is because while
politics and knowledge are interdependent, the feminist movement isnt. Another answer would
be that by deconstructing/analyzing, we produce knowledge and understanding, which may be
considered as necessary strategic practice.
While feminist may consider themselves guilty about their enjoyment of these certain
images, politics would be the serious part of ones life, considering a more serious undertaking of
problems.

Titu 4

It is necessary to admit that these images create pleasure for the spectators, mostly
because pleasure is an area of analysis itself. More pleasure is created when there comes the
resistance saying no.