#MeToo,Representation & the Cleansing of the Image. The Role of Gender Studies in Media, Art and Culture
Heidi de Mare, 3 December 2019
#MeToo, Representation & the Cleansing of the Image
The Role of Gender Studies in Media, Art & Culture.
The #MeToo movement has pontifically highlighted a new world view. For let’s face it, the public indictment of powerful men (and some women) who abuse their position to put others under sexual pressure is indeed news. But the accusation of transgressive behavior, the naming of concrete persons, like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, including their social positions, goes further. The focus has been shifted ‘from perpetrators to culture’, also in the Netherlands. Reference is made to male directors, actors, pop musicians and artists with a ‘dubious past’ and how this affects their work. It is further emphasized that heroes in films, as in literature, are usually male and that the ‘male gaze’ dominates film and the visual arts. Advertising and schoolbooks are as gender stereotyped as it was fifty years ago. In short, popular as well as high culture impose sexist ideas upon us.
