Feminist Hegemony in Media Culture as a Form of Gnostic Episteme

The article examines the phenomenon of feminist hegemony in contemporary media culture through a corpus of films from the post-#MeToo period. Three clusters are investigated: utopian and dystopian narratives with a strong feminist optic, historical biopics about female figures of power, and films in which bodily and mythological otherness becomes the main resource of subjectivity. This material analyzes the shift from feminism as a struggle for representation to a regime in which the female optic defines the symbolic conditions of visibility, desires, and affect. Special attention is paid to how the female gaze, bodily vulnerability, and traumatic experience begin to structure not only the plot but also the visual-affective regimes of truth, transforming female subjectivity from a marginalized position into a demiurgic center of contemporary visual imagination. The methodological framework combines gnostic optics (nomos–pleroma–pneuma), feminist theory of subjectivity, Lacanian triangulation of desire, and visual studies, allowing the operationalization of the interception of authorship, the structuring role of the gaze, and the ritual of refusal in the analysis of corpus films. The scientific novelty of the study lies in interpreting feminist subjectivity as an expression of gnostic epistemology, rather than merely a political or legal project. The concept of "hegemony of exceptionality" is proposed, within which female otherness functions not as an object of inclusion but as a principle of normalization: it sets the filters of visibility, the distribution of affect, and regimes of permissible desires. An analytical distinction is introduced between three states of female gnosis – refusal, authorship, and bodily pleroma – and the limits of these regimes are demonstrated in cases of bodily and mythological otherness. The conclusion is drawn about the formation of a regime of "hegemony of incompleteness" in media culture, where feminist power is understood as the right to reassemble the symbolic order while preserving cracks and open otherness. This clarifies the understanding of contemporary media culture as a field of competing gnostic myths.

Feminist hegemony, gnostic episteme, media culture, feminism, female gaze, female subjectivity, utopia and dystopia, historical biopic, gnosis, nomos