REPRESENTATIONS: The construction of gender in popular culture

Melanie Schllhammer 2001 The titles of the Little Miss/Mr. Men books sum up the notions of femininity and masculinity expressed in the stories. There are Little Miss Tidy and Mr.Messy, Little Miss Wise and Mr. Clever, Little Miss Tiny and Mr. Small, Little Miss Shy and Mr. Brave.

Little Miss Busy and Mr. Busy seemed to be the first equal couple on the bookshelf (not taking into account the difference in marital status). Only at first sight, though: Little Miss Busy is as busy as a bee cleaning the house from top to bottom and then from bottom to top, just to make sure; she even dusted the bread and polished the butter. Mr. Busy does things ten times faster as ever you or I could and he lives in a verybusy-looking house which hed built himself.
Little Miss Busy is diligent and dutiful; Mr. Busy is fast, productive and efficient.

Key questions
1. How do the contemporary media represent women in different ways? How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods? What are the social implications of different media representations of women? To what extent is human identity increasingly mediated?
How do your texts represent women? What themes/ narratives/ discourses are constructed for this group?

2.

Compare your text to past texts in terms of question 1.

What effect do these representations have on the audience? What effect do they have on society? Is media increasingly important in the way we understand our own identity and the identity of others?

3.

4.

Contemporary Representations of Women

Examples from TV, including advertising and music videos.
Can you come up with categories of women? How are they conveyed?

Accuracy of representations?
Is it possible to be wholly accurate?
Does society have a view on accuracy in the media and who monitors it?

A film representation of a character consists of at least 4 factors:

The character: gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality and look The collective cultural background and views of the producer/director/institution The audiences reaction to / reading of the character Where and when the representation takes place How far can we trust the representation that is being made an accurate portrayal? In whose interest is it that this representation be made? How do we relate to this representation?

Stereotyping
The expression stereotype has acquired a negative meaning, but Walter Lippmann sees stereotyping as a necessary and useful social process. He distinguishes three major functions of stereotyping:

1. Ordering process: categorisations, generalisations and typifications are instruments of societies to make sense of themselves. Such orderings are partial, but not always untrue, because partial knowledge is not false knowledge, it is simply not absolute knowledge. 2. Short cut: stereotypes work like signs, they are simple, striking and easily grasped, but still carry complex information. 3. Reference: as a sign, a stereotype refers to something we know in reality and associate certain ideas with. In referring to reality, reality is interpreted. In this sense, stereotyping is a projection of values onto the world. Stereotypes are therefore defined by their social function.

Melanie Schllhammer comments

I agree with Walter Lippmann in that stereotyping can be useful in communication as an ordering process or a shortcut. However, even though partial knowledge is not false knowledge incomplete information can influence our perception of a person or a social group as a whole and thus create a false impression, although the information given might be true. I do believe stereotypes not only express general agreements about a group in society, but also influence our ideas about this group. How we are seen determinates in part how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them, such seeing comes from representation.

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

The abundance of images of men and women in mass media:
Unlikely to have no impact on our own sense of identity But also unlikely to have a direct effect we dont simply borrow or copy identities from the media

In which ways might these images influence our own sense of identity?

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

What messages the media suggests to contemporary audiences about gender? What is the impact of those messages? Role of the media in the formation and negotiation of gender and sexual identities?
How we conduct ourselves is affected by these messages and experiences/narratives

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

Media shows us situations and relationships from other peoples point of view can hardly fail to affect our own way of conducting ourselves and our expectations (and judgements) of other peoples behaviour.

Domestic / romantic dramas? Magazines? Movie heroes? Images of attractive people? How are we affected by each? (see page 3 of introduction)

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

Men and Women today? What do we learn about the reality and changing attitudes?
Conclusion: Other peoples expectations get in the way of individual choices and achievements.

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

What does he have to say about femininity? Not necessarily the state of being a woman (unlike men?) Being feminine: just one of the performances that women can choose to employ in everyday life

Lessons learnt from Gauntlett

Traditional qualities of femininity redundant? Passivity, reticence, assuming that authority figures are probably right and youre probably wrong BUT traditional ways of thinking are still present

Media
Peddling same old, unrealistic or unfair stereotypes? Or enabler of ideas and meanings, promoting diversity and difference, which might lead to social change? (Fiske, 1989)

Testing how these representations are received

Stuart Halls encoding / decoding theory
messages are interpreted (decoded) differently from preferred to negotiated to oppositional reading.

How do women today respond to female representations in the media? How could you test effect on audiences?
Use previous slides to work out what women are likely to say in your research. Lead qualitative and quantitative research. Focus on: HOW they feel they are represented; How these messages might affect them or impact on their own sense of identity Do they feel part of a collective identity of women etc

Someones blog post about Women in Advertising (NOTE not much evidence is given for all these claims!) Examples of some of the effects on women from representations in adverts The companies have a moral responsibility also in the society. These commercials have a negative impact on the society and leads to problems faced for the common woman. The major ill effect is the pressure on woman to get those near-perfect bodies. They get so pressurized that they take the unhealthy way to reach the set goals. They develop eating disorders; their health gets affected which may sometimes result in irreparable damages. And those who never make it to that point, face humiliation and get taunted by everyone around them. This results in depression and other long-term psychological diseases.
According to researches and surveys conducted, most of the women vow that commercials lower their self-confidence and they visualize themselves as unattractive due to the image being portrayed of the perfect woman in ads. In America, seventy-five percent of healthy females think that they are over-weight. Half of the woman population are on some kind of diet program and nearly ten million women suffer from serious eating disorders. The weight of a fashion model is twenty three percent less than an average weighed ordinary woman.

After all this exposure, women viewers identify themselves as the weaker sex. Some think that males decide their self-worth. Over exposure of women as sex objects have triggered cases of physical assault and rapes. Majority of the women are taking the wrong way to get those stick figures, which are results in diseases, sometimes leading to death. And most of this is attributed to the advertisements that pour into the lives of innocent people everyday. Marketing ethics should be built to raise the status of woman in the society and give them the due respect but not degrade them.

The Matter of Images, Richard Dyer

Three main characteristics of contemporary media representation:

1. Representation is selective: individuals in the media are often used to replace a group of people. One member of this group then represents the whole social group.
2. Representation is culture-specific: representations are presentations. The use of codes and conventions available in a culture shapes and restricts what can be said ... about any aspect of reality in a given place, in a given society at a given time.

3. Representation is subject to interpretation: although visual codes are restricted by cultural convention, they do not have single determinate meanings. To a certain degree, their meaning is a matter of interpretation.

Gender Roles?
The expression role suggests a distinction between behaviour and the real person behind. Although Judith Butler describes gender as an artificially constructed identity, the artifice does not mask some other truth...Our performance of gender is artifice in the sense that it is created by us and not natural. We create the illusion of gender through our performance, but this does not imply gender can be changed like a dress. Although gender is constructed, it is an internalised role that, as part of our identity, becomes second nature. Identity is a complex structure rather than a single homogeneous unity, shaped by the influence of childhood, family, age and generation, body, nationality and culture. These different identities are not always in conformity with each other. For example, ones cultural identity can differ from their ethnic identity. Gender is one of many identities, but it is crucial because it relates to most of the others. Gender, childhood and family are linked because members of a family usually take on different gender roles. The appearance of gender in a society varies in relation to religion, culture or ethnic background, and of course our gender identity is closely related to our physical appearance, our body, and the norms and standards it is expected to meet.