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GENDER AND MEDIA. REPRESENTING,PRODUCING, CONSUMING.
SOFIE VAN BAUWEL & TONNY KRIJNEN. 2015.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of gender is important in forming our perceptions and appreciation of pop stars and
the music they produce
Our ultimate goal is to create an environment in which our readers can confidently make up their
own minds about the different interactions and relations between media and gender
Three different fields are discussed: the representation, the production and the reception of (mass)
media in relation to gender. All three are important in terms of how we think about media
messages, their producers and their audiences
o The negotiation of meanings of gender takes place on the level of production,
representation and reception and is marked by complicating factors
o Furthermore, the three fields should be viewed as interrelated
GENDER
Mostly, gender is viewed as the socially constructed meanings of one’s physical sex. Femininity and
masculinity are then viewed as socially constructed conventions and norms with regard to the
behaviour and appearance of women and men
The view on biological differences (“sex”) determining one’s gendered behaviour is known as
biological determinism, a gender approach strongly embedded in Western societies
These understandings of sex and gender dichotomies bring us to our first complexity: both sex and
gender are not dichotomies per se and both can be viewed as continuums
A non-essentialist approach to gender offers opportunities to think about the meanings of gender
o -> the conceptualisation of gender as a social construct and not reducible to the biological
o Gender should be viewed as a fluid and dynamic concept that is continuously
reconstructed
o The approach of doing gender and performativity is an important critique on the
sex/gender dichotomy described earlier and is still current in studies on gender and
sexuality, which we will explore in coming chapters
A related but slightly different critique on essentialism has been formulated in terms of
intersectionality
o Intersectionality places gender into context, but it also increases the complexity of
meanings
In this book we understand gender as a fluid concept with a meaning that is continuously
negotiated and intersects with many other features
MEDIA
In this book we are concerned with what are commonly called “mass media”. By mass media we
refer to media that aim to reach a relatively large audience of usually anonymous receivers with
much the same information
1
, Over the last few decades the media have changed due to both societal and technological
developments
o Societal development: increasing globalisation
o Technological development: blurring boundaries between the production, content and
reception of media
Globalisation: Instead of generalising local research results to the rest of the globe, authors have
started to concentrate more on the dispersion of (mainly North American) popular media to other
countries
o -> Cultural imperialism refers to the domination of powerful nations over weaker nations,
imposing their norms and values
Critiques of media imperialism
o The dispersion of media should not be understood as a one-way flow (from the centre, i.e.
US, to the periphery)
o The resistance of US domination, both by nations themselves as well as by audiences
Nations have different ways of protecting their own local cultures + audiences
should not be understood as sponges absorbing the media content they consume
o The fussiness of the concept of cultural imperialism: ‘American, Western, and capitalist –
can be used almost interchangeably in the media imperialism argument’
The last development within perspectives on media and globalisation is a more positive view.
Globalisation is viewed as something that takes place on a global scale (and not as a Western
phenomenon) enabling the creation of new communities and identities and cultural exchange
o -> cultural hybridity, localisation of cultural products, etc.
= Often these latter perspectives are viewed as oppositional to media imperialism, also called the
homogenisation vs. heterogenisation debate
However, this debate itself has recently been challenged
o Neither approach captures fully the global situation of creative works
o Instead, we should view the media industry as one of the transnational fields that are best
understood as polycentric systems with multiple competing centres
The second major development in media is technology
The impact of media technology on the dimensions of time and space
o This alteration of time and space by media technology is sometimes believed to have a
major impact on society
o “the global village”: collective identity and a sense of inter-connectivity
Criticism: technological determinism
o Not all technological inventions are intentional
o We should look at the social history of media technology (impact of society’s needs)
o The social use of media technology should be taken into account
-> ‘People always have choices about how technologies are created, understood and used.
However, when certain technologies become very extensive, embedded and taken for granted,
they can also constrain or limit the range of available choices.’
Media technology has major consequences on media production, content, reception and the
relations to gender
One of these consequences is the convergence of media technologies
o Use of one device for multiple purposes, fe smartphone = newspaper, television, SNS, etc.
Another consequence is the organisation of social relationships and media industries
o Societies are organised in networks with various centres, which has important
repercussions for processes of production, experience, power and culture
2
, Connected to this idea of network sociality is the concept of mediatisation
o Mediatisation = a concept used ‘to capture somehow the broad consequences for
everyday life and practical organisation of media, and more particularly of the pervasive
spread of media contents and platforms through all types of context and practice’
o Media are increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives
o An approach to power that not only locates power with large social institutions but in
everyday life micro-politics became more present in media studies
The rapid development of media technology seems to have an impact on the concepts used in
studying the media
o As the boundaries between production, content, and reception of media are increasingly
blurred, the jargon common in academia to study these phenomena is challenged
o This blurring of boundaries complicates our investigation in yet another way; it adds
another layer of understanding the concept of media production, content and reception
o It also indicates a more active approach to media production, content and reception
GENDER AND MEDIA STUDIES
Work on gender in relation to the media has a long history that coincides with feminist movements
Though academic work on media came into existence as early as the rise of media, most of this
work showed great disinterest in women as a topic of investigation
o Male bias + underrepresentation of women in universities
The second wave feminist movement, starting in the early 1960s in the US, is thought to have
contributed to some gender awareness in academia
o However, this was only possible because the topics raised by feminists were already part
of the traditional communication research agendas of that time
1) Social roles and stereotypes: inspired by the thought that by the under-representation and
stereotypical representation of women in the media, female audience members lack positive role
models to model their behaviour on
2) Ideology as a theme was and is part of the domain of critical inquiries of cultural studies
o Marxist perspectives, media as “ideological state apparatuses,” “interpellation,”
hegemony (naturalisation of power relations)
3) Pornography
o Pornography is considered to objectify women. Women are usually treated as objects of
male sexual desire, and usually are not present in pornography as active sexual agents
o Pornofication refers to the notion of mainstream cultural products being imbued with
aesthetics of porn
o The commercialisation of sex and sexuality is hailed as “girl power” (celebrating sex)
o However, this appropriation of girl power and feminist vocabulary by commerce is a very
normative affair. Young women are “forced” to participate in sexualisation and
pornofication in order to obtain femininity
Post-feminism: a development in society in which women are thought to enjoy the benefits of
feminist activists’ hard-won freedoms, but are not willing to carry the burdens of positioning
themselves as feminists
o Many people strongly believe that gender equality in Western societies is a fact. There are
many things wrong with this observation
With this book we therefore hope to contribute to a more balanced view by giving the reader the
tools to form their own, well-informed opinions about current debates on gender and the media
3
, I – REPRESENTING
WHO IS REPRESENTED?
Many examples of media representations of gender that challenge gender norms in one way or
another
o While these examples suggest an enormous diversity in the representation of gender,
there certainly are clear patterns to be distinguished that contradict this diversity
o -> In this part, we will examine patterns of representing gender in the media
Realising that gender and its attached meanings are social constructs, feminist academics turned
to analysing representation of gender in the mass media, as media were considered to be one of
the sources in which meanings of gender were constructed
o Dual meaning of representation: representation refers to the re-presentation of men and
women in the media + representation refers to the portrayal and imagining of gender
A crucial question in debates regarding gender representation is how representations relate to
reality
o 1) Academics adhering to the reflective view on representation postulate that the numbers
of women and men present in the media should mirror those in a given society
o 2) The intentional theorists promote a perspective that scrutinises what the producer of
the representation wanted to say
o 3) Scholars that endorse a constructionist approach see representations as negotiations of
meaning
o -> the meaning of representation is not fixed but is co-created by its audience
WHAT ARE REPRESENTATIONS? – DIFFERENT VIEWS, DIFFERENT RESEARCH
How do representations of men and women relate to the cultural meanings of men and women in
society?
o About the relationship between representation and culture
Due to the dual understandings of the concept of representation, research on gender
representations in media is manifold
1) The first field, psycho-analysis, has its roots in film analysis
o How a movie evokes the pleasure of looking at another person as an erotic object
-> Movies then construct characters as objects for this pleasure, enabling a
particular way of “looking at” people, exercising the gaze (“gaze theory”)
Male characters in movies are more often bearers of the gaze, while female
characters are more often subjected to it. Often this is formulated as “looking-at”
and “to-be-looked-at-ness”
o Main points of criticism were directed at the strict gender binary it implies, the position of
the female audience, and the heteronormative viewpoints
By positioning the male as active and the female as passive, it reconstructs and
reifies the gender dichotomy, leaving no space for active women or passive men
The ideas are exclusively heteronormative viewpoints. Sexual lust and desire only
exists between men and women
2) The second field, semiotics, refers to a structuralist approach that concerns how signs work
o The meaning of a sign is never entirely fixed and the relationship between signifier and
signified is a constructed one
o Distinction between first- (denotation) and second-order (connotation) signification
4
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