The Female Gaze: Nuanced Censorship Of Women

Abstract

While some may believe sexism and discrimination have evaporated or are less severe amongst other forms of violence, they are kept under wraps in current patriarchal society and prevail to maintain inequality. In a world informed and structured by social systems, institutions, play a role in carrying out male dominance and female subordination through discrete mechanisms. One means of patriarchal safeguarding in Western society—in acquiescence with projecting ideas that support traditional gender, racial, and sexuality norms—is censoring ideas that alternatively challenge hegemonic beliefs and may disrupt social, political, economic, hierarchical arrangements (Rich 228). While research on gender discrimination in censorship, particularly the arts, widely exists, the persistence in different spaces assures its importance for examination. Because of new technologies, forms of consumption, and an increasingly visual culture, this generation is marked by nuanced censorship thus needing feminist analysis. I perform one case study examining the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the operator of New York public subway stations and trains, banning women’s sexual health and wellness advertisements—using feminist scholarship, and analysis of approved versus rejected advertisements, along with analysis of the MTA’s advertising policies—to look at the role of institutional power and gender bias in censorship.