2. Introduction
• Media in the plural
– no such thing as “the media”,
which assumes there is one
controlling entity
– All media communicates gender,
and gender influences all media
• Contradiction
– Gender norms are reinforced, yet
at the same time people are
allowed to work weaknesses in the
norms and challenge assumptions
• Media provides recurrent story
structures through which people
understand who they are and
where they fit into society
3. Economics
• Media messages are
governed by economic
processes
• Commercial television
was the first economic
medium
• Ads sell products to
audiences, and in turn
corporations sell
audiences to
advertisers
4. Power
• Influences all components of identity: gender,
race, class, nationality, etc.
• The driving force of changing the norms of
female beauty is media representations of
beauty
• Media is simultaneously:
– A commodity
– An art form
– An ideological forum for public discourse about social
issues and social change
5. Hegemony
• Is not all powerful
– Presumes possibility of resistance and opposition
– Must be maintained, repeated, reinforced, and modified
to respond to and overcome forms which oppose it
• Maintains hegemonic understandings of gender while
creating gaps and fissures in representations of gender
– Characters who go against or challenge norms are
generally surrounded by characters who do not
– Characters who don’t meet gender norms are usually still
attractive
• Unattractive characters are generally characters who are “bad”
6. Hegemony cont’d
Theodor Adorno & the John Fiske & cultural studies
Frankfurt School
• Media has a hegemonic • People don’t mindlessly
hold over people consume media messages,
but actively and creatively
• Media creates a false
engage with them
consciousness which allows
• Media messages are
people to thing they have
polysemous (open to a range
control over what they view
of different interpretations at
different times)
– Individuals determine meaning
of messages, not media
7. Polyvalence and Oppositional
Readings
• Celeste Condit suggests using polyvalence
(having a multitude of valuations) instead of
polysemy
• Audience shares understanding of
denotations, but disagrees about the
valuations of the denotations
– Disagreements produce different interpretations
8. Interlocking Institutions
• Media are mechanisms
through which other
institutions (family,
religion, work,
education) are
represented and
constructed
• Media are resources for
people’s sense of self
and modes of
expression
9. Differences Among Women
• Intersectionality is key
– Media socializes women towards femininity, but
“the degree to which this message is internalized
varies depending on factors such as race,
nationality, and sexual orientation”
• Women are held to a standard of beauty
attainable by very few, and possibly no one,
considering the amount of editing used on
images
10. Similarities Between Women
and Men
Marketed to Women Marketed to Men
The ideal female body marketed to women is not the same as the ideal
female body marketed to men
11. Similarities Between Women
and Men
Marketed to Women Marketed to Men
The male body which is marketed to women is not the same as the male body
marketed to men
12. U.S. (White) Hegemonic
Masculinity in Mediated
Communication
Symbolized by
Defined
Power = The man is the the
through Heterosexually
Physical breadwinner of frontiersman
occupational defined
force/control the family and
achievement
outdoorsman
13. Media Content and Media
Effects
Media Content Media Effects
• “[A]ttempts to quantify • Attempts to qualify the
what is in mediated effects of the media content
numbers
products.” (pg. 243) – Does the relative absence of
– Number of women and men women in programming
in TV programs influence perceptions of
women’s credibility?
– Number of violent acts in
children’s programming – Do violent acts in cartoons
translate to children acting
– Number of sexually explicit violently?
acts in prime time – Do sexually explicit acts
increase the tendency for some
men to rape?
14. Media Depictions of Rape
• Women are portrayed as victims (deserving or
undeserving)
• Men are portrayed as perpetrators or saviors
• 1970’s TV focused stories about rape on the
male protagonist seeking to avenge the rape,
rather than the focusing on the female who
experienced the rape
15. The Gaze(s)
Ways of Seeing The Gaze
• John Berger’s Ways of Seeing • Laura Mulvey
• From the Renaissance on, men • Suggests the cinematic “gaze” is
were presumed to be the viewer male
• The invention of the camera • Suggests cinema not only
changed how people see reinforces a woman should be
• Men act, women appear looked at, but also builds the way
• Limits: she is to be looked at
– The ways of looking are unique to • Limits:
Western art – Identifies a single and universal
– Predates changes in the way men’s “gaze”
bodies are presented in advertising
– Assumes the media alone affects
– Acting and appearing is a false the spectator, ignoring the
duality, as women’s appearance spectator’s education,
involves a lot of action
socialization, peer pressure, etc.
– Generalizes how people look at art
and how people look at each other – Ignores intersectionality
16. An Oppositional Gaze
• bell hooks (1992)
• In order to develop an
oppositional gaze and a
critical consciousness, one
must
– “consider the perspective from
which we look, vigilantly
asking ourselves who do we
identify with, whose image do
we love” (hooks)
– Recognize the degree to which
one participates in culture
– Transition from “social
critique” to “political action”
– Recognize the way which
contemporary media engage in
commodification
