hello and welcome to my easy-to-understand guide to Van Diemen's feminist theories there are several parts to her theory and you're going to need to know all of them so I'm going to go through them one by one the first part of her theory is that we get our ideas about gender from something she calls discourse discourse is written and moving image communication so that means when we read magazines the topics that we read about when we read the stories in newspapers when we watch films when we watch TV programs when we play video games that's all discourse and she thinks that we get our ideas about gender from those things so that means that she believes that we learn what it is to be female or male from the media products that we consume so perhaps when we watch films and we see women as the damsels in distress' we start to believe that females need to be weaker and more vulnerable perhaps when we see repeated representations of men as action heroes we start to believe that masculinity is all about being brave and strong the second part of an Zenon's theory is that she believes our ideas about gender have to be looked at in terms of the context the historical context and the cultural context and that those ideas about gender changed depending on the historical and cultural context so our ideas of what it was to be masculine in the 1950s may have been different to our ideas about what it is to be masculine now in the year 2018 likewise femininity may have been very different in the 1920s as it was in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s and now our ideas about what it is to be feminine and masculine in Britain might be very different to the ideas about what it is to be feminine and masculine in a different cultural context somewhere in the Middle East for example may have very different ideas about gender so it's important to look at the context to understand how people may have the agenda at the time so have a look at some of your set products and see if you can work out what people may have learned about gender from those particular texts perhaps women in the 1950s will it be the tide and got ideas about what it was to be feminine from that particular ad so perhaps women in the 50s would have seen it and understood that if they were going to be a traditional woman they were going to have to get married and have children and be domestic and be obsessed with cleaning and be very happy to do those domestic chores likewise if women were reading women's round magazine in the 1960s perhaps they would have been learning about what it was to be female to have a love of flowers of home making of sewing of cooking for your family of taking care of your hands the next part of Van Zenon's theory is that she believes women are often objectified in the media to be objectified means to be seen as an object so they're seen as something to be looked at to be bought to be sold something that doesn't really have a personality something that doesn't need to be seen as a person at all and you will see that in a whole range of media products you might see perfume adverse where it's just the woman's legs in the shot she doesn't even get a face because she's not seen as important she's seen more as decoration in the case of the vampire poster you have a helpless damsel in distress body is encased in quite a tight revealing dress with some flesh on display she's unconscious and she kind of feels like she's being objectified as she's held there by the male vampire certainly music videos tend to objectify women quite a lot so it's important if you get an unseen music video in an exam to be able to think about whether women have been objectified it's something that is very very common within the music industry women are seen as commodities something that makes money and in particular their bodies it doesn't even really need to be their faces so objectification van zina thinks is very very common she also believes that it illustrates the fact that we live in a patriarchal culture a patriarchal culture is one which tends to be dominated by men and so she believes that this objectification is often because our society is dominated by men and if society is dominated by men then may tend to be the ones who make the media products and therefore that's probably why women are objectified another part of Vann Zenon's theory is that she believes that women and men are often represented very differently women are often represented in her view as being domestic they're seen as homemakers as mothers as wives as people who should be doing cleaning and cooking and laundry and she thinks that many media products confine women to that domestic sphere whereas men she thinks are often represented as being more individuals and being more suited to the workplace and to the place of politics final part of an Zenon's theory that you need to be aware of is that she often believes that men and women's bodies are represented in different ways now we've already spoken about how she believes women's bodies are objectified sexualized she believes that men's bodies are shown as what she calls spectacle that means that men's bodies are seen as something spectacular they've worked hard to achieve something strong something brave we see them with their abs their six-packs the muscles in their arms and so even when men are shown wearing very few items of clothing for example on men's magazines we are often seeing their body is something that they've worked hard to achieve and that we should admire because of how they've achieved it whereas women's bodies are being shown as something that we should lust over and that we shouldn't necessarily give any credit to the woman for having that body we shouldn't see it as something she's worked hard for we should just see it as something that we want to buy or have or take