Oral - Places and Forms of Power: the first and the second wave of feminism between the 60's and the 2010'S

Anglais – Lieux et formes de pouvoir

        The notion I'm going to introduce is Places and forms of power. There are different places of power, it can be found in the family, in school, in politics or in work, and in different forms such as rules, laws or money.

        The notion can be illustrated with the example of feminism. In this chapter, we saw the first and the second wave of feminism between the 60's and the 2010's.

        Firstly we will see how women depicted in the songs of the 60's and 70's, secondly we will see what did music represent for a lot of girls in the 90's. Finally we will see how is the new generation dealing with feminism.

        For the 60's and 70's, we saw the example of Patti Smith who adopts an iconoclastic attitude by adopting a male attitude and by swearing when women ''weren't supposed to swear''.

        Her music is described as bold and beautiful poetry. She has daring and fearless lyrics.

        Patti Smith is one-of-a-kind, she feels different from other female artists because she denounces the fact that other females artists are too preoccupied with their own as women, there for it perpetuates the vicious circle.

        For the 90's, we saw the example of Kathleen Hanna and Queen Latifah. They are both from the 90's, and as such, they both stand against inequalities between men and women. They belong to 2nd wave of feminism, wich focuses on personal issues, more paticulary on domestic violence, rather than 1st wave of feminism, wich focused on women's legal empowerment. Moreover they both promote women's sexual empowerment.

        However, they also focuses on different aspects :

• whereas Kathleen Hanna advocates total solidarity between women, Queen Latifah on the other hand, criticizes women who disrespect themselves or who undermine other women by perpuating and repeating the sexist stereotypes they hear.
• in terms of space, Queen Latifah tries to empower women in the streets contrary to Kathleen Hanna, who tries to give women their space back in public places where they feel endangered.

        Finally they use different music styles to denounce inequalities.

        For the 2010's, we saw the example of Taylor Swift and Grimes. They denounce misogyny and the fact that women must sell themselves for a promotion.

        They denounce the fact that they have no control over their image, they are infatilized or sexualized. They also say that feminism is misunderstand and interpreted as a hatred of men whereas it's a struggle for equality.

        Women have therefore fought for their rights, even if all is not won. There is an evolution in the extent and impact of feminism

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