Can you find a clip to refute him?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6LHg_OFFRY

Week 8 Lecture 1

Audience Theories and Introduction to Gender Representation

• Introduce a basic critical vocabulary to students’ discussions of the media.

• Understand criticisms of media through frameworks of gender.

• Take a quick look at audience theories because they might be useful for your paper.

Audience Theory

• Hypodermic Needle/Transmission Theory

• Two-Step Flow• Uses and Gradiations• Reception theory.

Audiences – Hypodermic Needle/Transmission Theory

• Media are agents of social control that convey certain ideological values to us.

• Media are “injected into a passive audience.”

• Example: “Violent videogames lead to increases in crime.”

Audiences – Two-Step Flow

• First Step: Opinion Leaders watch the media and receive information.

• Second Step: Opinion leaders pass the information on – along with further interpretation – to the rest of us.

Audiences – Uses and Gratifications

• Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

• Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g.) substituting soap operas for family life

• Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behavior and values from texts

• Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living e.g.) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

Audiences – Reception Theory

• Producers “encode” a media message• Audiences “decode” it– The meanings might be different!

But producers can use certain tools to position audiences to read the text in a preferred way.

Polysemic

• The kinds of gender and race analyses we are going to look at in the coming weeks make the assumption that texts are “polysemic” – or simply – can be interpreted in multiple ways.

Gender and the Media

Gender

• “Sex” refers to a biological sex difference: male or female.

• “Gender” refers to the way sex is used to “inform behaviors and competencies.”– Simone de Beauvoir “One is not born, but rather

becomes, a woman.”• That is why the latter is part of media studies,

because gender – ideas about what it means to be a man, or a woman – are communicated through the media.

The most radical view..

• …would be Judith Butler’s formulation that “all identity categories are…the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.”

• Gender is a social performance.

Gendered

• Something is ‘gendered’ when…”it exhibits patterns of difference by gender.” – Pink and blue gendered colours in Western

cultures.– Truck driving is “gendered” work.– So is…managing a football team… (Patricia

Amorem - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/americas/26brazil.html )

Poststructuralism• Finally, contemporary gender criticism takes place in the

broader intellectual context of poststructuralism.• Reject the concept of a “fixed identity”.• We only come to understand ourselves through

language – thus, that understanding is quite changeable.• “Meanings…cannot be fixed or stable, but are endlessly

remade through the process of reading/speaking changes in social life.”

• Language produces social reality – and this can vary across time and place.

Gender and the MediaChapter 1 in Book of Same title, ed, Rosalind Gill.

• Starts from the idea that “representations matter.” (Gill, 7).

• Feminist movements obviously occurred before the 1960s-70s, but this was the first one that happened in a modern media landscape.

• Gaye Tuchman (1978) described how women “were being destroyed by a combination of ‘abcence,’ ‘trivialization,’ and ‘condemnation.’

Gail Tuchman

• Absence: Goodyear Tire (1970 – who speaks?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td6m3OhO5zE

• Trivialization: Mercedes Ad (2000s?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l38blGqVeHc&feature=related

• Condemnation: Folgers Coffee Ad (1957) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-0rJlj_vwA&feature=related

Gender and Advertising

Studies of Gender Stereotyping in Ads

Ads about bodies…male and female…

• That have nothing to do with the product…

Not just for femininity…

Ads incorporating feminist rhetoric…

• 2004 campaign for Dove Soap.

• “Beauty Comes in all shapes and sizes…

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”

Airbrushing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4y5b7INvqE

• Reinforce ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman in our society.

• What kind of behavior is appropriate and what isn’t.

• What products make us more attractive – directly or indirectly.

Gender in the News• Advertising has some fun examples, but it isn’t

the only place gender plays out in the media.

Gender and the News

• Representation of Women in the News– 2001 Study of Women’s portrayal in the news media

: 17% of the world’s news subjects (newsmakers or interviewees) were women (Media Watch 1995)

– Women were least likely to appear in news stories about politics, government, business or the economy.

– More likely to appear in discussions about health, social issues, or arts.

83%

17%

Experts

MenWomen

Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity. 2007.

86%

14%

Spokespeople

MenWomen

Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity. 2007.

Doesn’t this just reflect reality?

• One could argue: women are less involved in political life, therefore, they are less represented in political and hard news programming.

• No: even in Sweden, where parliament is 43% female (in 1998), there was “not a single category of television programming in which women outnumbered men…they were most likely to be found in children's programmers.” (Gill 115)Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity. 2007.

Another Example - Cambodia

• Due to war, 64% of Cambodian population is women (2001).

• 55% of the labor force are women.• 6% of news items are about women.

Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity. 2007.

Not just quantity, also quality• Not just how much women

are portrayed, but how they are portrayed.

• In 1999 a study found that of all photographs not relevant to a story – 80% feature a young woman. (Gill 115)

• Similarly with advertisements… the default is a pretty lady.

Woman Journalists – How portrayed?

• Ageism: Miriam O’Reilly – Won an ageism claim against the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12167711

• Sexism: CNN’s Paula Zahn promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFv1IVutReo

Women Journalists How portrayed?

• War correspondent is probably the least common job for a female journalist.

• “Is her [job] so marvelous that she thought it worth making her daughter an orphan? This may be a war….we want information, not pictures of blondes in khaki” (Gill 123, quoting Magor The Scotsman, 10 October 2001).

• Lara Logan attacked a few weeks ago in Egypt, role as a mother highlighted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdCvDgmElss&feature=related

Women in Politics – How portrayed?

• Shradda Jadhav -First Female Mayor of Mumbai

• Newspapers wrote….• She “doesn’t fit the

stereotype of someone in a position of power”… she “behaves like a typical housewife, rather than an aggressive hungry go getter.” (Gill, 119)

Some women are taken seriously… others are not.

But even Hillary Clinton didn’t always enjoy such treatment…

Does employing more women in media lead to “better” representations of women in media?

• Some argue, yes:– “women are more people oriented rather than

issue oriented”– “women place greater importance on seeing news

in context rather than isolation…– “women like to explain the consequences of

events.”

– (Gill, 125).

• But there’s no real evidence to back up those claims .

• Van Zoonan’s empirical studies show there are two main differences. Female journalists are…– 1. More likely to look for female

experts/spokespersons.– 2. Tend to be more interested in the audience’s

interests.

This isn’t just about women…

• Media also is “gendered” toward men: telling men how to be men.

• The film will examine this more, but here is a quick example…

• Masculine stereotype in advertising: Old Spice, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE&feature=player_embedded

Airbrushed?

Killing Us Softly (1999)

• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9632437500432634#docid=-1993368502337678412

Tough Guise (1999)

• Lots of the examples in this lecture are about women – which isn’t fair.

• Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis of Masculinity. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9632437500432634#

• How popular culture shapes masculine identities.