ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we offer a basic discussion of three feminist orientations: liberal, cultural, and postmodern. Taken together, knowledge of these orientations sensitizes you to basic historical and socially contextualized feminist perspectives to start you on your analytical journey. Feminist thought is much more complex and nuanced than what one chapter can treat, so we encourage you to develop these search models through research.
When analyzing messages using feminist theory, you must consider your own position about the power struggles between men and women. Then, depending on the perspective(s) you are concerned with in the message(s) you are analyzing, you must ask yourself critical questions about the ways in which symbols, visual and verbal, are used to represent the experience of men and women, and their relationship to one another. Feminist criticism requires your meta-awareness of the gender bias you, as critical agent, enact.
We demonstrate feminist criticism by applying the search models to the films Beauty and the Beast and Shrek. These comparisons illustrate the ability of feminist theory to uncover conceptions of gender and power that may upend taken-for-granted expectations of a text.
