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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Written in a clear and accessible style, with lots of examples from Anglo-American media, Gender and the Media offers a critical introduction to the study of gender in the media, and an up-to-date assessment of the key issues and debates.
Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessment the book explores the contradictory character of contemporary gender representations, where confident expressions of girl power sit alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among young women, moral panics about the impact on men of idealized representations of the 'six-pack', but near silence about the pervasive re-sexualization of women's bodies, along with a growing use of irony and playfulness that render critique extremely difficult.
The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique.
Gender and the Media is also concerned with the theoretical tools available for analysing representations. A range of approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory are discussed, and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash, and positive images are for making sense of gender in today's Western media. Finally, Gender and the Media also raises questions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critique and intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotation marks seem to protect much media content from criticism and when much media content - from Sex and the City to revenge adverts - can be labelled postfeminist.
This is a book that will be of particular interest to students and scholars in gender and media studies, as well as those in sociology and cultural studies more generally.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Gender and the Media
Introduction: Representations Matter
Representations of Women in the Media
Audience Studies
Changing Feminisms
Cultural Politics and Activism
Conclusion: Debates, Dilemmas, Contradictions
2 Analysing Gender in Media Texts
Introduction
Content Analysis
Semiotics and Structuralism
Ideological Critique
Discourse Analysis
Foucaultian Approaches
Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, and Queer Theory
Conclusion
3 Advertising and Postfeminism
Advertising in the Mediascape
Advertising and Postfeminism
Conclusion: A Final Word from our Sponsors
4 News, Gender and Journalism
Here is the News … about Men
The Gendered Cultures of Journalism
The Changing Profession: Casualization, Media Management and the Rise of the Columnist
The New Journalism
News Reporting of Sexual Violence
Sex Crime News in the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion
5 Talk Shows: Feminism on TV?
Introduction
Talk-Show Controversies
The Roots of TV Talk Shows
Classifying Talk Shows
The audience discussion show
The therapeutic genre
Talk Shows as the New Public Sphere
Talk Shows as the ‘New Confessional’
Talk Shows and Women: Televisual Feminism?
The personal as political
Conclusion
6 Gender in Magazines: From Cosmopolitan to Loaded
Ideologies of Femininity
Teen Mags
Women’s Magazines: Debates and Dilemmas
Men’s Lifestyle Magazines
Conclusion
7 Postfeminist Romance
Introduction
Feminist Approaches to Romance
Complicating the story
Romance revisited
Enter Bridget Jones
Chick Lit: Romance for the Twenty-first Century?
Must-She TV
Conclusion
8 Postfeminist Media Culture?
A Postfeminist Sensibility
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Gender and the Media
Rosalind Gill
polity
Copyright © Rosalind Gill 2007
The right of Rosalind Gill to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK.
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9899-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk
Acknowledgements
This book has taken hundreds of years to write. Well, perhaps I exaggerate a tad, but it has certainly taken much longer than it should have done. In the manner of many first books it has been through drafts and re-drafts and radical rewritings in the pursuit of some illusory (or certainly elusive) perfection. Now that I’ve finished the final, imperfect version two feelings dominate: first there is puzzlement – is that it? Why on earth did it take me so long?; and secondly there is relief – relief that finally I will be able to respond to all those friendly and kindly meant inquiries about how the book is going with a conclusive ‘it’s done’. In short, I’ll be able to go to parties again!
One of the consequences of taking so long to write a book is that the acknowledgements page reads a bit like a list of ‘everyone who knows me’. First, I would like to thank all the people who have assisted me directly with research for this book – whether tracking down adverts, searching for newspaper articles, or sharing ideas about chick lit or lad mags. Special thanks to Elena Herdieckerhoff, Kamy Naficy, Karin Heisecke, Jennie Middleton, Rachel Lille, Samantha Reay, Jessica Pring Ellis, Matt Torney, Deborah Finding, Naureen Khan and Danielle Bikhazi for their invaluable contributions, both practical and intellectual.
Several people read all or parts of the manuscript in draft form and I would like to express my gratitude for their incisive and insightful comments. Special appreciation to the wonderful women in my writing group (Rachel Falmagne, Lesley Hoggart, Ann Phoenix, Bruna Seu and Merl Storr) who not only made constructive criticism such a positive experience, but also offered a different vision of academic labour and a pleasurable intellectual ‘home’ in the cafes and bars of Bloomsbury. Angela McRobbie read and commented on the entire manuscript and I’m grateful for her feedback and encouragement, as well as the example of her own work which I have found consistently thoughtful and inspiring. Sylvia Chant’s sheer energy and joie de vivre has made her a pleasure to know and I’m grateful for her unstinting enthusiasm for this project, and for fitting in comments on chapters while flying between Costa Rica, Mexico, Gambia and the Philippines.
Thanks also to Sadie Wearing, Dee Amy-Chinn, Christina Scharff, Paul Stenner and Dimitris Papadopoulos for helpful comments on sections of this book.
In addition to those generous people who have read and commented on parts of the book, my acknowledgements would not be complete without an expression of gratitude to a number of other people who have helped, supported and inspired me in my academic career so far. Despite its insularity, intellectual work is always a collective project and it would be impossible to thank everyone who has sparked new ideas or provoked me to think differently. But I would like to mention the following people for particular appreciation: Michael Billig, Margaret Wetherell, Stuart Hall, Jonathan Potter, Steve Woolgar and Valerie Walkerdine. Thank you.
The LSE has been a stimulating environment in which to work, and I have benefited from its excellent library, as well as from the many outstanding international scholars who provide a feast of lectures and seminars every day of the week. I’m grateful to the exceptionally interesting and talented students who have taken my Masters course in Gender and Media – many of them media practitioners themselves, and all of them set to make a positive difference in the world. I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful colleagues in the LSE’s Gender Institute, and in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths where I worked previously. I would like to highlight Clare Hemmings, Diane Perrons, Karen Throsby, Elisabeth Kelan and Caroline Ramozonoglu for intellectual nourishment and supportive collegiality.
Polity Press has been fabulous, and I would like to thank Gill Motley and Andrea Drugan for being a real pleasure to work with, and for good-humouredly tolerating more delays than a British train service, as I went for the unofficial award of ‘most postponed manuscript in the history of academic publishing’. Thanks also, Andrea, for embracing the ‘crazy’ fridge idea – instead of having me committed!
Two other people deserve special mention for their absolutely crucial but invisible contributions to this project. Gabrielle Bikhazi’s consistently wonderful, loving care for Katarina over the past three years has freed up many of the hours I’ve spent working on this book. Gaby – you are a very special person and I hope you know how appreciated you are. The other ‘behind the scenes’ support has come from Hazel Johnstone, departmental manager of the Gender Institute and organizer-extraordinaire. Thank you, Hazel, for help and kindnesses that are literally too numerous to mention.
Finally, I would like to thank my dear friends, my adopted ‘family’ in London (and Nottingham). To Andy Pratt, Bruna Seu, Wilma Mangabeira, Paulo Wrobel, Ann Phoenix, Chris Phipps, Sylvia Chant and Veronica Forwood: thank you for everything – your love of life, generosity of spirit, sense of humour, for being there during all the bad times as well as the good, and for all the wonderful conversations, delicious food and red wine we have shared – and will, I hope, continue to share.
This book is dedicated to my mother, Janet Gill, and to the memory of my father, Michael Gill. Their love, care, humanity and passion for social justice has been a shining light throughout my life. It is also dedicated to Thomas and Katarina, with love.
Introduction
THIS is a book about the representation of gender in the media in contemporary Western societies. It is written against the backdrop of phenomenally rapid change: changes in gender relations; transformations in media technologies, regulatory frameworks, content, ownership and control, and globalization; and theoretical ‘revolutions’ in the approaches used to make sense of gender representations. Gender and the Media aims to freeze the frame, press the pause button, or hit the refresh key to explore how the media today construct femininity, masculinity and gender relations, and to think about the kinds of theoretical concepts and cultural politics that might be needed to engage with these changes.
The book is born out of an interest in the extraordinary contradictoriness of constructions of gender in today’s media: confident expressions of ‘girl power’ sit alongside reports of ‘epidemic’ levels of anorexia and body dysmorphia; graphic tabloid reports of rape are placed cheek by jowl with adverts for lap-dancing clubs and telephone sex lines; lad magazines declare the ‘sex war’ over, while reinstating beauty contests and championing new, ironic modes of sexism; and there are regular moral panics about the impact on men of the new, idealized male body imagery, while the re-sexualization of women’s bodies in public space goes virtually unremarked upon. Everywhere, it seems, feminist ideas have become a kind of common sense, yet feminism has never been more bitterly repudiated.
Some commentators see in this evidence of a powerful backlash against feminism (Faludi 1992). Germaine Greer (1999), for instance, argues that today’s popular culture is significantly less feminist than that of thirty years ago, and Imelda Whelehan suggests that we have entered an era of ‘retro-sexism’ in which representations of women, ‘from the banal to the downright offensive’ are being ‘defensively reinvented against cultural changes in women’s lives’ (2000: 11). By contrast, others regard the media as increasingly influenced by feminism, or, indeed, as becoming feminist. David Gauntlett argues ‘the traditional view of a woman as a housewife or low status worker has been kick-boxed out of the picture by the feisty, successful “girl power” icons’ (2002: 247). The media, he argues, offer popular feminism which is like ‘a radio-friendly remix of a multilayered song, with the most exciting bits sampled and some of the dense stuff left out’ (2002: 252). Meanwhile, Angela McRobbie points to the ‘enormous energy in the way in which sexual politics now bursts across our television screens … From Newsnight to Oprah … [F]emale independence has entered into contemporary common sense’ (1999: 126).
It seems to me that both these arguments are true. On the one hand feminist ideas are increasingly taken for granted across a range of media and genres, vibrant girlzines spring up all over the world, and the Web is home to an enormous diversity of feminist ideas ranging from support over breast cancer to ‘babes against the bomb’. But on the other, boring and predictable patterns of sexism persist – such as the continued invisibility of older women on television, or the depressingly narrow range of depictions of black women – and newer representational practices are often far from hopeful – for example, the rise of ‘porno chic’, the growth of unabashed ‘laddism’, and the vitriolic attacks in press and magazines on women who fail to live up to increasingly narrow normative requirements of feminine appearance. It is precisely the contradictoriness of contemporary representations of gender in the media that makes the field so difficult and challenging.
Added to this picture of paradox and complexity, there is another issue: like the media, gender relations and feminist ideas are themselves changing and in flux. There is no stable, unchanging feminist perspective from which to make a cool appraisal of contemporary gender in the media. Rather, feminist ideas are constantly transforming in response to different critiques, to new or previously excluded constituencies, to younger generations, to new theoretical ideas, and to the experience of various kinds of struggle. There is no single feminism, but instead many, diverse feminisms. If media representations of gender have changed, then so too have the feminist ideas used to understand and critique them. And, likewise, gender relations are constantly changing. Indeed, we are often told that Western democracies are experiencing nothing short of a ‘genderquake’, so profound are the current transformations.
Gender and the Media is an attempt to make sense of this picture of flux and transformation. The book has three main aims. First, it seeks to provide an analysis of the contemporary representations of gender in the media in Western societies, in all their messy contradictoriness. Its particular focus is upon how media constructions of gender have changed in recent years in response to feminist critiques and wider social transformations, and, to that end, it looks in detail at five types of media where different kinds of change can be seen very clearly: news, advertising, talk shows, magazines and contemporary screen and paperback romances. In relation to each it is concerned not only with the representation of women, but also with constructions of masculinity, and how contemporary gender relations are depicted. How should we make sense of the increasing presence of eroticized images of the male body across the media landscape? What are we to make of the shift from discourses of romance to those of sex and celebrity in young women’s magazines? Are talk shows like Oprah and Ricki redrawing the boundaries between the public and the private? What impact, if any, has the increasing number of female journalists had on ‘news’? What kinds of constructions of heterosexual relationships are to be found in ‘chick lit’ and ‘lad lit’ and how different are these from traditional romances? These are just some of the questions asked.
Secondly, this book is concerned with the theoretical tools available for analysing media representations. It aims to interrogate some of the key terms that have been used to study gender in media texts, since scholars and activists first engaged with media representations of gender. Gender and the Media both acknowledges its debt to the vibrant and heterogeneous feminist media scholarship since the 1970s, and also seeks to question the relevance of some central concepts to critique in today’s mediated world. For example, how useful is the notion of ‘objectification’ in a mediascape in which far from being presented as passive objects women are increasingly depicted as active, desiring sexual subjects? What does it mean to talk about the ‘feminization’ of an area (e.g. news)? Are the notions of ‘backlash’, ‘retro-sexism’ and ‘postfeminism’ helpful for making sense of contemporary media representations? How should the pervasive irony and playfulness of today’s media be understood?
Thirdly, Gender and the Media is interested in cultural politics. It seeks to raise questions about what forms of political or cultural intervention are appropriate and effective to challenge particular constructions of gender, in a postmodern age in which critiques are routinely reflexively incorporated into media products and in which much sexism comes in an ironic guise which rebuffs easy protest: ‘that is not a sexist image’, we are told, ‘it is a hilarious, knowing send-up of an old-fashioned “dumb blonde” stereotypes’! Whilst an earlier generation of feminist media activists put stickers or daubed graffiti on advertising images deemed to insult or trivialize women, today, as often as not, advertisers already orientate to potential critique within the adverts themselves – whether from feminists or simply from media-savvy and ‘sign fatigued’ consumers, weary of the relentless bombardment by consumer images. How, in this context, might people concerned or angry about media representations of men or women, lesbians or gays, mount an effective political critique? What kind of feminist cultural politics is appropriate for the new media age? I cannot claim exhaustively to answer these questions here, but by providing an analysis of contemporary media representations and pointing to some of the new ways in which gender is figured I hope to draw attention to the ways in which older critical languages may fail to engage with gender in the media today, and to point to spaces where a new cultural politics might be developed.
These three themes – constructions of gender, the theoretical tools for analysing gender in the media, and feminist cultural politics – are what animate this book. Above all, the book deals with what is new and distinctive about representations of gender today compared with earlier eras, what concepts are needed for making sense of this, and what kinds of cultural intervention might constitute effective engagements in the contemporary media landscape.
The book opens with a review of the central themes and concerns of research about gender and the media. Chapter 1 charts different theoretical and political investments in feminist studies of media texts, and examines the turn to audience studies. Although this book is limited to examining constructions of gender in the media, and does not report on audience research, the notion that texts are polysemic and can be interpreted in multiple ways is central to the analyses presented here. The implications of the shift away from textual determinism or hypodermic conceptions of meaning cannot be overestimated. The chapter also discusses how feminist perspectives have changed as a consequence of critiques by black and Third World women, and the impact of post-structuralism and postmodernism. The final part of the chapter considers some of the central debates about the representation of gender in the media.
The second chapter is more methodological in focus and examines the key approaches that have been used to analyse gender in media texts, for example content analysis, semiotics and discourse analysis, discussing their strengths and weaknesses. It also introduces ideas from postmodernism, postcolonial studies and queer theory, as they have been used in media studies. Together the first two chapters form a foundation for the remainder of the book, which is concerned with looking in detail at five broad areas.
Chapter 3, Advertising and Postfeminism, both reviews earlier studies of gender in advertisements and provides a new analysis of how advertising is changing. Several themes of postfeminist advertising are discussed, including the prevalence of gender reversals and revenge ads, the development of images of empowered, (hetero) sexually active young women, and the growth of ‘queer chic’ in advertising.
Chapter 4 looks at news and gender. Set against the context of journalism’s transformation from a public service to a market-led product, the chapter examines the rise of ‘infotainment’ or ‘newszak’ and considers the gender dimensions of this shift. What makes something newsworthy? How are women represented in the news? Is news being dumbed down? And what is meant by the ‘feminization’ of journalism? A detailed case study of the reporting of sexual violence provides an opportunity for evaluating the continuities as well as changes in news about gender.
Television talk shows are the subject of chapter 5. The chapter distinguishes between audience discussion programmes, the therapeutic genre and ‘trash’ or confrontation talk shows, and considers whether talk shows constitute a new ‘public sphere’ which today eclipses political institutions as a site of significant public debate. Notions of the talk show as the new ‘confessional’ are also discussed and the chapter examines whether talk shows might be empowering for marginalized groups by giving voice to people not usually heard on mainstream TV and allowing the articulation of anti-normative messages.
Chapter 6 focuses on magazines. It describes some of the shifts in recent years in magazines aimed at girls and women, in particular the adoption of a feminist register, the emphasis upon celebrity, and the promotion of the sexualized body as the key site of femininity. It also examines in detail the rise of the ‘lad magazines’ since the mid-1990s and asks how this should be understood – as a response to feminism, a reaction against ‘de-sexualized’ new man scripts or a distinctive new classed and racialized articulation of masculinity.
The last of the substantive chapters considers the genre of romance, which has shown remarkable resilience and staying power in the face of significant social structural shifts and ongoing transformations of intimacy. Focusing on Bridget Jones’s Diary and the rise of ‘chick lit’ the chapter examines constructions of gender, ‘race’ and sexuality and asks in what ways contemporary popular depictions of heterosexual love are different from earlier romances. These texts are interesting because they are structured both by conventional formulas and by an engagement with feminism. Do they offer new versions of heterosexual partnerships? How different are their constructions of femininity and masculinity compared with Harlequin or Mills & Boon novels? Why and in what way have singleness and the body become such preoccupations? The chapter concludes with a discussion of two popular TV shows – Ally McBeal and Sex and the City – to put forward an argument about a new postfeminist sensibility.
This argument is developed in the conclusion, which draws together the strands of the book and attempts to provide an assessment of some of the ways in which the representation of gender in the media is changing – partly in response to feminism. The concluding chapter also returns to questions about cultural politics, and, in the light of the arguments provided in the book, asks what kinds of intervention are needed today to engage with and challenge representations of gender in the media in order to produce gender relations that are more equal, open, generous and hopeful.
1Gender and the Media
Introduction: Representations Matter
WE live in a world that is stratified along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, sexuality and location, and in which the privileges, disadvantages and exclusions associated with such categories are unevenly distributed. We also live in a world which is increasingly saturated by media and information and communication technologies. In many respects, the last four decades of research in feminist media studies has been an attempt to explore the relationship between these two facts.
Starting from the proposition that representations matter, feminist analyses of the media have been animated by the desire to understand how images and cultural constructions are connected to patterns of inequality, domination and oppression. Sometimes this has involved examining representations and textual practices in some detail. Sometimes it has emphasized the active, creative negotiations that audiences make with texts. Sometimes the pleasures offered by the media have been foregrounded, and at other times their ideological impact has been stressed. Occasionally, researchers have gone ‘behind-the-scenes’ to look at the production of particular media, or at the political economy of media industries which means that some media products are made, while others are not even dreamed. Taken together this research has produced a field that is vibrant, exciting and diverse. It is a field that strives to be both theoretically engaged and empirically driven, and which produces rigorous analyses in the context of ethical and political commitments to creating a more just world.
The study of gender and media is extraordinarily heterogeneous. Researchers may agree that cultural representations constitute an important site for examination and struggle, but on all else they disagree. The field is thus characterized by a plurality of different approaches and perspectives: different methodologies, different theoretical perspectives, different epistemological commitments, different understandings of power, different conceptualizations of the relationship between representations and ‘reality’, and different understandings of how media images relate to individuals’ sense of identity and subjectivity. A feeling for the differences and debates should emerge throughout this book, and the diversity of different approaches is dealt with in detail in chapter 2. In this chapter I want to offer an overview of the field, looking at some of its central themes and preoccupations and examining how and why the study of gender and the media has changed. Of course, this review is a partial and interested one, and its focus is upon laying the foundations to think about how representations have changed since the early studies of gender and media in the 1960s and 1970s, how the available critical vocabularies have been transformed, and what kind of feminist cultural critique is now possible.
The chapter is divided into five parts. In the first part I will look at the assumptions that underpinned early feminist studies of the representation of women in the media and will highlight a number of key features of this work, including its connection to and embeddedness in feminist activist communities and its sense of certainty and confidence about both the meaning of images and the possibility of change. This section will then go on to consider the impact of more complex theories of meaning coming from post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and will also examine the ‘turn to pleasure’.
The second section of the chapter is concerned with the development of audience studies, as a reaction against problematic notions of textual determinism which posited the viewer/reader/hearer as entirely passive. Three types of audience research are considered: focused on interpretations, pleasures, and the use of media as (domestic) communication technologies. This section also raises dilemmas about the role of the feminist cultural critic: should she be claiming respect for women’s pleasures or criticizing gender ideologies; celebrating women’s choices or formulating alternative representational strategies? What is the relationship of the feminist intellectual to women as a group?
Section three turns to feminism itself and argues that this too has transformed over the past decades in response to black women’s critiques, to post-structuralist theory, to the growth of interest in masculinity and the arrival of queer theory on the intellectual scene.
The fourth section is concerned with feminist cultural politics and activism and explores the diverse ways in which feminist analyses of media representations have been translated into demands for change.
Finally, section five, the conclusion of the chapter, raises questions about the efficacy of contemporary critical vocabularies for both analysing and contesting media representations, briefly discussing different views of irony, objectification and the incorporation or commodification of feminist ideas, all of which are taken up and discussed in more detail later in the book. Overall, the chapter seeks to highlight the differences and debates within the study of gender and the media and to give a sense of the ongoing transformations in this field as critical, theoretical and political perspectives change alongside profound changes in the media themselves.
Representations of Women in the Media
The 1970s and all that
Those involved in the tide of feminist creativity, thinking and activism that swept the Western world in the late 1960s and 1970s faced a challenge that earlier women’s movements had not known: a world dominated by media. Unlike their mothers and grandmothers, second-wave feminists were bombarded daily by representations of womanhood and gender relations in news and magazines, on radio and TV, in film and on billboards. Not surprisingly, then, the media became a major focus of feminist research, critique and intervention.
Early feminist media critique came from a number of different sources. Women working or studying in universities within the newly emerging disciplines of cultural studies or communication studies became increasingly aware of the ‘blind spot’ that characterized these fields in relation to gender. Whilst research from the 1960s and 1970s had a significant interest in the ideological nature of media (particularly news), it was largely defined in a way that excluded questions about the portrayal of women. It focused instead on topics such as the reporting of demonstrations and industrial disputes. The issues of class and class conflict were paramount – reflecting the early influence of Marxism – and research rarely engaged with gender, race or sexuality (CCCS Women’s group 1978). Women in universities found that they were up against the ‘male as norm’ problem, in which women were frequently entirely invisible, and men were taken to stand for the whole human population.
A second strand of critique came from women who worked within journalism or broadcasting and were concerned about the lack of opportunities for women working within the media. They argued that the lack of interesting fictional roles, the absence of female newsreaders, and the poor representation of women within senior media positions had a profound impact upon how women were seen in society as a whole. Organizations such as Women in Media and the Equality Working Party of the National Union of Journalists in the UK played a key part in promoting awareness of issues about the representation of women and campaigning for change.
Meanwhile, outside both the academy and media industries, other groups of women were angry about what they saw as the narrow range of patronizing or demeaning stereotypes through which women were represented. A number of feminist groups were established in Europe, Australia and the USA (and elsewhere) whose aim was to monitor the way that women were portrayed, to campaign against sexist advertisements, and to challenge ‘degrading’ presentations of women, such as televisual events like the Miss World competition.
One of the things that is striking about this moment was the degree of congruence and overlap between the agendas of academics, media workers and activists. Indeed, one of the earliest and most famous studies of the representation of women in advertising in the USA was conducted by the National Organization of Women (NOW) and published in the New York Times Magazine (Hennessee 1972). It relied on ‘ordinary women’ from all over the USA analysing and coding television adverts. The study analysed more than 1,200 commercials over an eighteen-month period. It found that more than one-third of adverts showed women as domestic agents who were dependent upon men, and nearly half portrayed women as ‘household functionaries’. The study also reported many examples of women being depicted as ‘decorative objects’ and portrayed as ‘unintelligent’.
Many other studies from this era were conducted using a similar content analytic strategy. Essentially content analysis involves counting the number of instances of particular kinds of portrayal – such as the number of women relative to men, or the number of times women in adverts or dramas are shown in the kitchen or bedroom – to produce quantitative statistical data (see chapter 2 for more discussion). The advantages of this approach are that it is quick, cheap and produces high-status quantitative results. As the NOW study demonstrated, it can also be done by anyone after a minimum of training, and produces data that are hard-hitting and useful for campaigning purposes.
Not all gender and media research in the 1970s relied upon content analysis, however. Some researchers were extremely critical of the limitations of this form of analysis – attacking it for its problematic ‘realist’ assumptions, a preoccupation with only the manifest content of representations, and a focus on single images – usually well-worn stereotypes – rather than broader structures of meaning (Cowie 1978; Gledhill 1978; Baehr 1980; Jaddou and Williams 1981). In Europe, two other traditions of work developed in the 1970s – semiotic analysis and ideological analysis. This research did not rely for its force upon contrasts between representations and ‘reality’ but instead was concerned with how texts operate to produce meanings which reproduce dominant ideologies of gender (e.g. McRobbie 1977; Williamson 1978; Winship 1978).
Looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, all this work is notable not only for building the foundations of feminist media studies, but also for the extraordinary (by today’s academic standards) confidence of the analyses produced. Reviewing a decade of studies in 1978, Gaye Tuchman (1978) unequivocally entitled her article ‘the symbolic annihilation of women in the mass media’, and wrote of how women were being destroyed by a combination of ‘absence’, ‘trivialization’ and ‘condemnation’. Such clear evaluations were not unique and were accompanied by similarly robust calls to action – whether these were voiced as demands for more women in the industry, campaigns for ‘positive images’ or ‘guerrilla interventions’ into billboard advertisements. Writing about this period of research on gender and the media, Angela McRobbie (1999) has characterized it as one of ‘angry repudiation’.
Beyond transmission: instabilities of meaning
By the late 1980s ‘angry repudiation’ had largely given way to something more equivocal and complex. As Myra Macdonald (1995) has noted, one of the reasons for this is that media content changed dramatically over this period. The notion that the media offered a relatively stable template of femininity to which to aspire gave way to a much more plural and fragmented set of signifiers of gender. There was a new playfulness in media representations, a borrowing of codes between different genres, and a growing awareness and interest in processes of image construction, as evidenced in the increasing number of programmes which featured humourous outtakes from films, home video compilations, and behind-the-scenes programmes about the making of films, adverts and TV series. Overall, media output was shaped by producers and consumers who were increasingly ‘media-savvy’ and familiar with the terms of cultural critique, including feminism (Goldman 1992).
Paralleling this change in media content was a profound shift in the theoretical languages available to media scholars. Liesbet Van Zoonen (1994) has argued that despite the significant differences between content analysis, semiotics and ideological analysis, these positions all relied upon a transmission model of the media: a view that the media are agents of social control conveying stereotypical and ideological values about women and femininity. This view was challenged and disrupted by the arrival of post-structuralism onto the intellectual scene: a collection of ideas loosely associated with the writings of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. There is not space to explore these thinkers’ ideas in any detail here (but see chapter 2 for a longer discussion). Their impact on feminist media studies was felt largely in three ways.
First, this body of writing gave weight to the critique of realism that was already underway within feminist media studies. Indictment of media content for its bias or distortion relied on the notion of an unproblematic distinction between ‘representations’ and ‘reality’ that – in post-structuralist terms – is unsustainable: being premised on a notion of some pure, unmediated access to reality. In practice, as Charlotte Brunsdon (1987) has argued, calls for more realistic representations of gender are usually calls for one’s own version of reality to be depicted. Moreover, ‘more feminist’ images might be perceived as thin and propagandist by many audiences because they do not have the familiarity or easy-recognizability of other more stereotypical representations. Rather than calling for a hall of mirrors in the media, calls for realism might best be reformulated as attempts to create greater diversity in representations of women – in a context in which most women who appear in the media are young, white, able-bodied, middle-class, apparently heterosexual and conventionally attractive (Macdonald 1995).
In place of the view of the media as reflecting reality, research drawing on post-structuralist frameworks argued that the media were involved in constructing reality. Quite literally they produced and constituted understandings, subjectivities and versions of the world. This insight extended to gender: rather than there being a pre-existing reality to the meaning of the categories masculine and feminine, the media were involved in actively producing gender. In the words of Theresa de Lauretis (1989), cinema, television, magazines are ‘technologies of gender’ (as well as of ‘race’, class, and other differences): the representation of gender is its construction. (A discussion of how Judith Butler’s work extended this notion is found in chapter 2.)
This constructionist argument connects to a second impact of post-structuralism on feminist media studies: namely a developing interest in identity, subjectivity and desire. This represented a break with the traditional notion of the unified rational subject, and suggested that subjectivity was split, fragmented and contradictory. Femininity and masculinity were thus conceived of as shifting and subject to change; ongoing discursive constructions rather than fixed positions. In film studies and analyses of visual culture this led to developing interest in how texts positioned spectators. In the less psychoanalytically influenced world of media studies it was felt more powerfully as a ‘turn to discourse’ and an interest in the discursive construction of gender and sexuality. (Queer theory is discussed in chapter 2.)
Thirdly, post-structuralist ideas destabilized conventional notions of meaning. Building on the semiotic idea of chains of signification, Derrida’s work pointed to the ways that meaning could resist fixity and could be endlessly deferred. In post-structuralist theory meaning is never single, univocal or total, but rather is fluid, ambiguous and contradictory: a site of ongoing conflict and contestation. One of the issues this raised for studies of gender in the media was how, then, to identify representations as sexist or progressive. Was their meaning completely open? This remains a central tension in the field with ongoing debates about how particular images should be read. As notions of irony, parody and pastiche abound, such dilemmas have become even more complex: in the last few years, images that for some commentators represent crude and offensive stereotypes have been reclaimed as ironic, playful or even subversive comments or send-ups.
Finally post-structuralism called into question the ‘innocence’ of feminism, asking it to acknowledge its ‘will to power’, a point that had particular resonances with black women’s critique of the ways that the feminist knowledge could be used to support attacks on the black population, for example in racist immigration policies (see later in this chapter). One can think also of how feminist-sounding ideas about women’s oppression under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan were used by the Bush administration to justify bombing that country.
Media pleasures
If the language for critical evaluation of texts changed in the late 1980s, then feminist media studies was also transformed by what we might call the ‘turn to pleasure’. This had a number of determinants. At a general level it grew out of the collapse in the notion of a straightforward, unproblematic distinction between high and popular culture that is associated with postmodernism and with the increasing institutional respectability of media and cultural studies (Jameson 1984; Foster 1985; Featherstone 1991). This challenged traditional notions of aesthetic value and argued that it was as meaningful to study Bob Dylan as John Keats, as one famous discussion put it (Hare 1992). It was connected with radical critiques of the artistic and literary ‘canon’ and with a desire to democratize what was seen by some as a white, male, elitist notion of ‘culture’.
Another set of influences on the turn to pleasure came from the growing anger amongst feminist writers that media forms enjoyed by women were ignored, or condemned as trivial and uninteresting. This was not just a matter of academics ignoring popular culture; a specifically gendered dynamic was in play: it was understood as the dismissal of women’s culture. Writing about her decision to study soap operas, for example, Christine Geraghty (1991) argued that programmes enjoyed by so many women should not be ignored and were worthy of attention simply because they offered so much pleasure to female audiences. The lack of attention to what were sometimes (problematically) known as ‘women’s genres’ was regarded as part of a more general double standard which always worked to ignore or disparage women’s interests: the time had come to ‘rescue’ these and accord them some proper attention and respect.
Alongside these factors there was also increasing frustration at the straitjacketing effect of critical readings of texts and what was perceived by some as the tedious monotony of their depressing findings about sexism in the media. For some writers, the reduction of studies of the media to studies of the working of gender ideologies constituted too restricted and impoverished an understanding. It did not even begin to address the multiple, contradictory and pleasurable ways in which media played a part in people’s lives (Brown 1990). For others, a focus on pleasure was needed not to counterbalance the focus on ideology, but to deepen understandings of it: without knowing how texts address profound unmet desires or offer pleasures, a full understanding of the workings of ideology in the media was not deemed possible (Modleski 1982; Radway 1984).
The move was also given impetus by the ‘guilty prefaces phenomenon’. This was the tendency of feminist critics to start their books or articles by professing of their (often secret) enjoyment of the texts under consideration (e.g. glossy magazines or soap operas) before proceeding with an ideological deconstruction in which pleasure would never be mentioned again (Winship 1987). As Jean Grimshaw put it, ‘it is perfectly possible to agree in one’s head that certain images of women might be reactionary or damaging or oppressive while remaining committed to them in emotion or desire’ (1999: 99).
One of the earliest and most significant attempts to take pleasure seriously is to be found in Tania Modleski’s (1982) Loving with a Vengeance, which analysed soap operas, Gothic novels and Harlequin romances. Positioned partly as a critique of earlier feminist writing on romance which dismissed it variously as a seductive trap to make male domination more palatable, a distraction (from women’s struggle for equality) or a kind of false consciousness, Modleski used psychoanalytic theory to attempt to theorize the kinds of pleasure offered to women by these forms. Talking about popular romances, Modleski argued that they are not simply escapist fantasies designed to dope women but fictions that engage in complex and contradictory ways with real problems – offering temporary, magical, fantasy or symbolic solutions (see chapter 7 for detailed discussion).
Modleski’s book was a tour de force which had a dramatic impact on the entire way romance was understood. Nevertheless it is worth pointing out that her thesis about the pleasures of soaps and other fictions was based entirely on her own textual reading and did not include any form of research with audiences or readers. This became the pattern for the wave of work that followed on soaps, dramas, quiz shows and music videos (Fiske 1987, 1990; Brown 1990; Geraghty 1991). Essentially, the turn to pleasure was a shift from reading texts for the purpose of uncovering gendered ideologies to reading them to speculate about gendered pleasures.
The shift was valuable in opening up more complex and nuanced understandings of texts and in widening scholarly engagement with the media in ways that went beyond simple critique. Some writing, like Modleski’s, emphasized the significance of fantasy and desire in understanding how people related to media texts, and opened up new ways of thinking about identification/dis-identification (see also Blackman and Walkerdine 1996; Walkerdine 1997). Similarly the emphasis upon understanding pleasure contributed to fresh thinking about realism, and the pluralizing of the term to include the importance of emotional realism (Brunsdon 2000).
Too often, however, research on media pleasures remained trapped within an old notion of textual determinism. The pleasures were to be found encoded in the text, waiting to be discovered.
Another problem with this turn was its reliance on essentialist notions of gender. This operated at a number of levels: in assumptions about what constitute ‘women’s genres’; in the unexamined use of phrases such as ‘women’s culture’, ‘women’s language’ and ‘feminine discourse’; in the lack of sensitivity to differences between women; and in the use of analytic concepts that rely on an assumed common gender sensibility – sometimes constructed in the most crude way, such as attributing women’s liking for soap operas to similarities with their experience of orgasm (multiple, rather than involving one single climax) or, more socially, to their fit with the rhythms of domestic routines (Fiske 1987).
Perhaps paradoxically, a further tension in the literature on media pleasures is its desire to stay related to critique. Despite criticizing the impoverishing effects of feminist media studies’ preoccupation with deconstructing pernicious gender discourses and ideologies, it seems that some writers wanted to maintain this focus through their analysis of textual pleasures. This led to rather an odd assumption in some research: namely the notion that the pleasures women derive from media are the outcome of the opportunities they offer for (psychic/political) resistance. Here is Mary Ellen Brown writing about her own perspective of feminist culturalist TV criticism or ‘resistance theory’: ‘Resistance theory comprises a body of work which addresses the issue of how ordinary people and sub cultural groups can resist hegemonic or dominant pressures and consequently obtain pleasure’ (Brown 1990: 12).
The key word in this quotation is ‘consequently’ – since it suggests that pleasure is intimately tied to, indeed consequent upon, resistance to hegemonic or dominant culture. This seems to me a strange assumption, yet it is present in much of this writing. I know from my own media use that sometimes pleasure is related to identifying with strong, empowered, critical characters, but just as often it is ideologically neutral (or difficult to pin down) or even relies on a collusion with dominant representations, for example the sensual pleasures of engaging with a women’s magazine, with its smooth glossy pages, its scent of perfumes, and its feast of representations of beautiful women in sumptuous clothes and settings. To turn around Jean Grimshaw’s insightful quote (see p. 14), it is perfectly possible to derive significant pleasure from representations that politically one may wish to critique!
Brown’s position of simply eliding pleasure and resistance avoids all the difficult questions about complicity in subordination, and more broadly about the complex relationship between cultural representations and individual subjectivities, fantasies and desires. Turning the tables to take a look at one of the most dominant ‘men’s genres’ – pornography – quickly shows the problems with this argument, for it would be difficult to sustain the notion that enjoyment of pornography was an act of resistance against hegemonic gender relations! It indicates yet another form of the essentialism prevalent in this body of work: a notion of the female subject as somehow essentially radical or resistant.
Writing more than twenty years ago Judith Williamson produced an excoriating critique of what she called ‘pointless populism’ in feminist media studies’ preoccupation with pleasure: ‘It used to be an act of daring on the left to claim enjoyment of Dallas, disco dancing or any other piece of mass popular culture. Now it seems to require equal daring to suggest that such activities, while certainly enjoyable, are not radical’ (Williamson 1986b: 14). Similarly, Modleski, though one of the first to devote attention to pleasure, subsequently wrote with concern about what she perceived as an uncritical celebration of it:
It seemed important at one historical moment to emphasize the way ‘the people’ resist mass culture’s manipulation. Today, we are in danger of forgetting the crucial fact that like the rest of the world even the cultural analyst may sometimes be a ‘cultural dupe’ – which is, after all, only an ugly way of saying that we exist inside ideology, that we are all victims, down to the very depths of our psyches, of political and cultural domination. (Modleski 1991: 45)
Audience Studies
One of the limitations of textual analysis, as I have noted already, is that it tells us very little about how audiences might actually consume and make sense of different media products. The early research within media studies is often accused of ‘textual determinism’, that is, of implying that audiences are simply passive dupes who uncritically absorbed the messages sent to them in particular broadcasts or articles. This is closely related to criticisms of the ‘hypodermic model’ of effects research which dominated early communication studies in the 1940s and 1950s. There is not space here to review the effects paradigms and the uses and gratifications approach which followed it. Instead the focus is on audience studies as it developed from the 1980s onwards, profoundly influenced by feminist understandings. I will focus upon three different moments of recent audience studies: the encoding/decoding moment; the focus on audience pleasures; and the shift to studying information and communication technologies in the context of everyday life.
Encoding/decoding/interpretation
The first type of audience research drew on the encoding/decoding model developed by Stuart Hall (1973). This had three premises: first, that the same event can be encoded (represented) in more than one way; secondly, the message always contains more than one potential meaning besides the preferred encoded one; and thirdly, messages therefore have the potential to be read in different ways. Using these insights Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley produced a landmark study of audience reception in 1980. The programme under analysis was a current affairs television magazine show called Nationwide that was aired in Britain throughout the 1970s, directly following the early evening news. In the first volume of their report they analysed the codes of the programme in some detail, using a range of critical analytical tools, broadly influenced by Marxism and semiotics (Brunsdon and Morley 1978). It was the second report, published by the BFI in 1980, that really broke new ground. It reported on their attempts to map and classify different people’s responses to the programme. Rather than simply looking at the myriad different interpretations people made, Morley wanted to see the patterning of different responses. Drawing on Frank Parkin’s (1972) work on how people inhabit different classed meaning systems, he proposed three broad types of audience position. He suggested that someone might take the meaning fully within the interpretive framework proposed and preferred by the programme – this would then be a dominant reading. Alternatively, they might make a negotiated reading which modified the preferred reading slightly but without rejecting its entire terms. Or thirdly they might bring an alternative frame of reference to bear and read the encoded message in an oppositional way.
What Morley sought to do was to identify and code these different modes of interpretation and to investigate whether they were related to different kinds of structural location and cultural competencies. Class was a primary interest and he expected decodings systematically to co-vary with class position. However he was also interested in the way that different kinds of social/cultural memberships and competencies affected readings – and to this end interviewed schoolchildren, managers, trade union members and so on.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this study. Not only did it become a founding text of the ‘new’ audience studies, but it went beyond statements about texts being polysemic and audiences being active to actually investigate the patterned nature of different interpretations. It was interested in difference, especially in class, and its relationship to the cultural resources deployed in understanding a media text.
The influence of this work can be seen in much feminist media studies. Andrea Press’s (1990; 1991) work in particular has been notable for taking seriously class differences in readings of the 1980s show Dynasty, and, more recently, in responses to media coverage of abortion (Press and Cole 1999). Elizabeth Frazer’s (1987) work on teenage girls reading Jackie magazine was an early example of attempts to take seriously unevenly divided classed resources for sense making, and Dawn Currie’s (1999) work on teenage magazine readers also bears the influence of this work. In recent years there have also been more studies which have looked at the impact of ‘race’ and ethnicity in mediating audiences’ responses to programmes like the Cosby Show and other sitcoms.
Audience pleasures
A second type of audience research has been more concerned with fictional forms and understanding women’s pleasures. Janice Radway’s (1984) groundbreaking book Reading the Romance combined textual analysis of Harlequin novels with an interview-based ethnographic study of committed romance readers, and a detailed examination of publishing and bookselling as economic enterprises. Her work has sometimes been regarded as an exemplary example of media/cultural analysis in its attempt to grapple with different ‘moments’ of the cultural process – production, distribution, text and audience – in a way that allows romantic fiction to be understood as simultaneously an economic, cultural, ideological and pleasurable phenomenon.
Radway’s audience analysis focused on a group of avid romance readers whom she calls the ‘Smithton women’, all of whom used the services of ‘Dot’ to advise them on which romance novels to purchase. Using a combination of semi-structured interviews, group discussions and observation, Radway attempted to uncover the meanings the women gave to their romance reading. She found that far from being unintelligent dopes the women were sophisticated readers of romance, able to make subtle differentiations within the genre and to pick up on small nuances and cues from the cover pictures and blurbs in order to determine whether books would meet their particular tastes and needs.
Radway’s work is ambivalently positioned in relation to romantic fiction. On the one hand she is critical of Harlequin novels, arguing that they are profoundly conservative, posing some of the problems of life in a patriarchal society only to resolve them through an idealized depiction of heterosexual love. On the other hand she understands women’s use of these novels as – in part – oppositional. Like Modleski she finds that one of the pleasures of romance reading is wish-fulfilment in which, in ‘escaping’ into the heroine’s life, readers vicariously experience what it is to be really loved and nurtured in the way they crave.
The act of reading can also be understood as ‘combative’ and ‘compensatory’; a way of carving out some time or space for themselves:
In picking up a book … they refuse temporarily their family’s otherwise constant demands that they tend to the wants of others even as they act deliberately to do something for their own private pleasure … Romance reading addresses needs created in them but not met by patriarchal institutions and engendering practices. (Radway 1984: 211)
Contradictory subjects: the feminist cultural critic
Radway’s work has become the focus of a number of important debates in media and cultural studies. These are concerned with what feminist cultural criticism should involve (e.g. critique, celebration or affirmation, respect, etc.) and the nature of the relationship between the cultural critic and her respondents. Ien Ang (1996) has criticized Radway’s work because of the relationship she establishes between herself as critic and the women she studies, and because of her attempts (as Ang sees it) to constantly re-invoke feminist authority.
Ang (1996) argues that Radway does not sufficiently reflect upon or problematize her relationship with the Smithton women, and that she draws far too stark and hierarchical a distinction between herself (a feminist and not a romance reader) and her respondents (romance readers but not feminists). Part of the problem, Ang argues, is that Radway starts from the premise that something is wrong, that is, that romance reading is a problematic activity that needs to be explained and resolved. This assumption informs the whole project so that even though the reading of romances is thought to contain some oppositional features, ultimately it is regarded as working to reconcile women to their subordination in heterosexual relationships. Indeed, Radway argues that romance reading may actually absorb some of women’s critiques of patriarchal heterosexuality which might otherwise have been formulated as demands for ‘real’ change.
Ang (1996) contends that Radway is working with a thinly veiled political moralism – a vanguardism which seeks to make ‘them’ (romance readers) more like ‘us’ (feminists), and implicitly regards feminists accounts as superior. As well as contesting whether this is necessarily true (would feminism actually make these women happier?), Ang argues that Radway fails to take pleasure seriously in its own right because it is always read in terms of its ideological functions.
By contrast, Ang’s (1985; 1990: 86) own research on audiences for Dallas refuses to make any judgements about the political effects of the fans’ identifications. She argues that the position ascribed to the melodramatic heroine Sue Ellen is one of ‘masochism and powerlessness: a self-destructive mode of femininity which in social and political terms must be seen as regressive and unproductive’. But rather than condemning this identification, she argues that it is possible to observe the gratification it offers to the women (and some men) involved, for example pleasures of abandonment, and so that self (re-) construction is not needed. She emphasizes that these are fantasy identifications with a fictional character and argues that it is simply not possible to say in the abstract whether these feelings might have an empowering or paralysing effect upon the subject experiencing them. This would require analysis of the context of fantasizing.
The debate between Radway and Ang goes beyond the issue of how particular texts and interpretations should be read, to the heart of questions about what feminist media studies should be or should do, and the nature of the relationship between the feminist critic and women.
