1. COMMUNICATING GENDER DIVERSITY:
CHAPTER 11 MEDIA
BY: NICOLE LLOY (BROOKS)

2. • “How would your life be different if...You
were conscious about the food you ate, the
people you surround yourself with, and the
media you watch, listen to, or read? Let
today be the day...You pay attention to what
you feed your mind, your body, and your
life. Create a nourishing environment
conducive to your growth and well-being
today.”
• ― Steve Maraboli,

3. MEDIA AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION
• “It might seem odd to approach media as an
institution: How can television signals, movie
projections or radio waves be an institution?”
• We approach media as an institution to make it
clear that the ability to focus on a specific
broadcast or one medium is inadequate.
• Also, media is one of the primary devices that
echo gender while also advocating resistance in
both the “construction and reception” of media.
• Additionally, there is the possibility of
oppositional readings of media messages that we
must emphasis that such readings are not equally
available to all audiences. One of the reasons
being the economics of media.

4. MEDIA ECONOMICS
• Studying media as an institution aims attention
to the economics of media including; production
as well as programming.
• “Media messages are not simply artifacts
created for art’s sake; economic processes and
institutional patterns govern them.”
• Today television provides the best example that
correlates the relationship between content and
economics.
• However once one recognizes the role that
economics plays it will soon become apparent
that television programming’s ideological role is
not incidental to its status as a commodity but
instead is implicated in it.

5. MEDIA &
POWER
• Under the influence of media?
• “Given that the U.S. is a consumer culture,
understanding media is one way to understand how
power, an element of media as an institution, manifests
itself. Institutions are organized in accord with and
permeated by power.”
• Media forms such as; advertisements and movies have
the power to influence social norms specific to gender,
race, class, nationality along with any other ingredient
that constitutes identity.
• Female beauty is just one example of power that media
has over gender. Beauty norms are constantly changing
and the driving force in that particular change is the
media’s idea or representation of what beauty is.
• “Media criticism is not about dismissing people’s
personal choices and pleasures; it is about preserving
consciousness of the larger context in which our
personal choices occur, so that we will be better
informed about their potential consequences, for
ourselves as well as for others.”

6. MEDIA & HEGEMONY
• “The term hegemony designates the systems of hierarchy
maintained by the predominant social group’s ideology that
comes to dominate other social groups.”
• “Hegemony is the process whereby the interests of a ruling
group come to dominate by establishing the common sense, that
is, those values, beliefs, and knowledge's that go without
saying.”
• Media as an institution of society shapes the rational structures
through which people identify and evaluate social reality.
• However, with that said, this hegemonic system is not all too
powerful. It must be maintained, repeated, reinforced and
modified in order to respond to and overcome any forms that
may potentially oppose it.
• Furthermore, media as a primary institution and focus of
today’s society. Maintain hegemonic understandings of gender
even as they create gaps in the way gender is represented. For
example; popular TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy that feature
more masculine women and feminine men the vast majority of
characters tend to abide by traditional gender expectations.
However, even though the characters act and behave more
masculine, they still meet the standards of feminine
attractiveness.

7. MEDIA POLYVALENCE & OPPOSITIONAL READINGS
• John Fiske believes that, “media messages are polysemous, or open to a range
of different interpretations at different times. Media is not determined by the
media providers but created individually by each person.”
• Fisk may be correct that “textual polysemy exists, but the range and richness of
the possible meanings depend on the ability of audiences to produce them.”
• In addition, media texts simply cannot be “all things to all people,” this is
because media(s) focal point is to have some interpretations preferred.
• Polyvalence occurs typically when audience members share the same
understandings of the meanings of a text but disagree about the evaluation of
these meanings to a certain extent that the individual concludes different
interpretations.
• Oppositional interpretations of mainstream media texts should be understood in
their social contexts, and some contexts provide more opportunities and training
in resistant readings. Basically , different people at any time have different
resources available to them for resistance and must expand more or less effort to
construct resistant readings.
• Even though people can view media in diverse ways, they tend to produce
similar readings, and these similarities reveal traits about identity, gender.

8. INTERLOCKING INSTITUTIONS
• “Of all the institutions that intersect, media may
be the most interconnected.”
• Media is not only an example of an institution
but is also the mechanism by which other
institutions are characterized and created.
• However, these characterizations are not
necessarily represented so simply. This is
because media messages are so diverse and tend
to contradict themselves and because they do not
enter peoples worldviews unfiltered they instead
become resources that people use and refer to in
regards to their sense of self expression.

9. IT’S NOT ABOUT SEX DIFFERENCE
DIFFERENCES AMONG WOMEN
• “Much criticism of media has focused on their creation of an
unattainable standard of beauty for women, this beauty norm
does not affect all women identically, and men are beginning to
grapple with similar pressures for the ideal body.” The diverse
differences in women’s reception depend on race and ethnicity.
Even though images may be understood as unrealistic and
unobtainable are likely to be less powerful. However, these
images still influence self-perception.
• Even though all women may be held to specific beauty standards,
the standards are not the same for all women.
• The books refers to a cross-cultural analysis that examined and
compared magazine ads published in Singapore, Taiwan and the
U.S. Overall, the magazines in Taiwan & Singapore were
dominated by facial beauty products and the U.S. focused on
clothing. However, they also found that women’s bodies in the
ads were more sexualized than any other Asian advertisements.
They concluded that women as sex objects is not universal in
other countries. In addition, when an advertisement appearing in
an Asian magazine did in fact sexualize models that appeared to
be Caucasian.

10. IT’S NOT ABOUT SEX DIFFERENCE
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN WOMEN & MEN
• “Body image pressure does not come from people of
another sex and the media they peruse but from the
media targeted at people of that sex.”
• For example; the ideal male figure marketed to men is
more muscular than the ideal male figure marketed to
women.
• Men today are increasingly subjected by body image
aspirations. Just like women men’s body standards
have also changed over time.
• Media representations of male models are more
significant because they present an image to which
other men can aspire to in regards to men and the
media the “hegemonic masculinity” is accomplished
through coercion but also through consent even
though there is never a complete consensus.

11. MEDIA CONTENT & MEDIA EFFECTS
• The majority of media research has primarily focused on the product; the
content of media. Media content analysis attempts to quantify what is in
facilitated products. Meaning the research may count the male to female
ratio in television programs or the amount of violence that occurs in
children’s programming to the amount of sexually explicit content that airs
during prime time TV. The identifications of these various and rather
problematic media messages is one way to shed some light on how media
relates to modern day society.

12. THE GAZE
• The 2nd most prominent aspect of media research
primarily focuses on the media constructions of
an audience.
• Today the presumed sex of the viewer is male.
However, even when the viewer is female, she is
viewing herself through male’s eyes. In addition,
when women evaluate their bodies they are not
assessing their bodies from a woman’s
perspective but instead a male’s perspective.
• From the reading, John Berger suggest that “the
boundaries should be kept distinct; the gaze is a
system that works when discussing realistic
representations. However, it is not automatically
reproduced in individual behavior.”

13. OPPOSITIONAL GAZE
• Recognition of ways in which audiences are
gendered/raced vital contributions to one’s overall
understanding of gendered/raced content of facilitated
communication. To be a participant in media dialog
about gender and race one must obtain a investigative
vocabulary with which they can then discuss the content
of the gaze.
• First, to embrace an oppositional gaze, one must
consider their perspective. Do we identify with the
image that we love?
• Second, we must recognize the degree to which we
actively participate in culture.
• Third, an oppositional gaze necessarily moves from
social critique to political action.
• And finally, an oppositional gaze is mindful of the way
in which modern media engages in the selling of
culture.

14. GENDER IS CONSTRUCTED & THUS IS
ALWAYS IN FLUX
• An example in which representations of gender seem to
be increasingly destabilized is the appearance of
masculinity in British & U.S. men’s magazines. The
magazines depict men as confused and insecure in the
modern world.
• However, in comparison women’s magazines like
Cosmopolitan the women featured on the cover are all
unnaturally thin and the cover highlights numerous
topics of sexually explicit content that condemns such
discussions and actions.
• “Even though many media representations reinforce
traditional gender norms, modern media has a more
complex view of gender and sexuality than ever
before.”

15. CONCLUSION
• “The creativity and artistry involved in media creations
opens spaces for creative performances of gender-within
limits.”
• Regardless, of the politics that so much of today’s media is
regressive, most people enjoy and take pleasure in going
to the movies, surfing the web and reading magazines.
• The risk is not that people part take in these acts is that
they do them uncritically. The audience acts as passive
recipients of media, not as active participants in culture.
• “The more one realizes that one can talk back to the
screen, the page or the picture, the more one realizes that
one is not merely buying a commodity.”