Feminist and postcolonial theory: van Zoonen on gender as constructed and the male gaze, bell hooks on intersectionality, Gilroy on diasporic identity and the postcolonial critique of media representation.

What this dot point is asking

AQA sets feminist and postcolonial theorists for representation. You must know van Zoonen, bell hooks and Gilroy by name and apply them to gendered and racialised representations in set products. The marks reward accurate attribution and applied analysis, because questions can require a named theorist.

Feminist theory: van Zoonen

Liesbet van Zoonen argued that gender is constructed through media discourse rather than being natural. The meaning of gender shifts across cultures and time, and the media play a central role in defining it, so what counts as masculine or feminine is a product of representation, not biology. She drew on the idea of the male gaze, in which visual media position the spectator as a heterosexual man and present women as objects of desire through codes such as framing, costume, lighting and posture. For van Zoonen, analysing gender means examining how these codes construct and naturalise a particular, often patriarchal, version of gender.

Feminist theory: bell hooks

bell hooks defined feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. Her key contribution for AQA is intersectionality: she argued that gender cannot be separated from race and class, because these combine to shape experience and representation. A representation of a woman of colour cannot be understood through gender alone, because her race and class position shape how she is represented and received. Intersectionality therefore demands that you analyse the combination of identities a representation constructs, not a single axis, and it sharpens analysis of who is marginalised and how.

Postcolonial theory: Gilroy

Paul Gilroy argued that colonial discourse persists in contemporary media and culture, sustaining racial hierarchies and a sense of imperial nostalgia in which the colonial past is remembered selectively and positively. He theorised diasporic identity and the Black Atlantic, stressing that identities formed through migration are hybrid and cross national boundaries, challenging fixed, essentialist ideas of race and nation. For Gilroy, media representations can either reproduce colonial hierarchies and a narrow national identity, or reflect the hybrid, transnational identities that migration has produced, and analysis should ask which a product does.