kevin boyd media as a social institution
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Kevin Boyd
CMS 498
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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
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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
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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
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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”
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Hegemony cont’d
Theodor Adorno & the Frankfurt School
• Media has a hegemonic hold over people
• Media creates a false consciousness which allows people to thing they have control over what they view
John Fiske & cultural studies
• People don’t mindlessly consume media messages, but actively and creatively engage with them
• Media messages are polysemous (open to a range of different interpretations at different times)
– Individuals determine meaning of messages, not media
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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U.S. (White) Hegemonic Masculinity in Mediated
Communication
Power = Physical
force/control
Defined through
occupational achievement
The man is the breadwinner of
the family
Symbolized by the
frontiersman and
outdoorsman
Heterosexually defined
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Media Content and Media Effects
Media Content
• “[A]ttempts to quantify what is in mediated products.” (pg. 243) – Number of women and men
in TV programs
– Number of violent acts in children’s programming
– Number of sexually explicit acts in prime time
Media Effects
• Attempts to qualify the effects of the media content numbers – Does the relative absence of
women in programming influence perceptions of women’s credibility?
– Do violent acts in cartoons translate to children acting violently?
– Do sexually explicit acts increase the tendency for some men to rape?
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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
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The Gaze(s)
Ways of Seeing • John Berger’s Ways of Seeing • From the Renaissance on, men
were presumed to be the viewer • The invention of the camera
changed how people see • Men act, women appear • Limits:
– The ways of looking are unique to Western art
– Predates changes in the way men’s bodies are presented in advertising
– Acting and appearing is a false duality, as women’s appearance involves a lot of action
– Generalizes how people look at art and how people look at each other
The Gaze • Laura Mulvey • Suggests the cinematic “gaze” is
male • Suggests cinema not only
reinforces a woman should be looked at, but also builds the way she is to be looked at
• Limits: – Identifies a single and universal
“gaze” – Assumes the media alone affects
the spectator, ignoring the spectator’s education, socialization, peer pressure, etc.
– Ignores intersectionality
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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