One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power

Author:Nina Power
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781780997377
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2012-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

2.2 Consumer Culture: Girls on Film

What does contemporary visual culture say about women? Here a thought experiment comes in handy: The so-called ‘Bechdel Test’, first described in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, consists of the following rules, to be applied to films, but could easily be extended to literature:

Does it have at least two women in it,

Who [at some point] talk to each other,

About something besides a man.

Writer Charles Stross adds that

if you extend #3 only slightly, to read ‘About something besides men or marriage or babies’, you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.39

Once you know about the test, it’s impossible not to apply it, however casually. Stross is right – huge quantities of cultural output (possibly even more than he suggests) fail. Several questions emerge from the test:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.