Media, Gender and Identity

Media, Gender and Identity

1. Chapter 1- Introduction

   • discourse> a way of talking about things; a set of ideas within a culture which shapes how we perceive the world
   • biological determinism> the view that people's behaviour patterns are the result of their genes and their biological inheritance
   • social constructionism> the view that people's personality and behaviour are not predetermined by biology, but are shaped by society and culture
   • modern life and modernity> the present time in developed Western countries
   • Myspace> 2003 Youtube> 2005

2. Chapter 2- Some background debates

   • Adorno vs Fiske
     • "We may feel emotions or have a conversation about an interesting show with friends, but Adorno would say that we are still drones, manipulated by the system to want the pleasures which it offers, and satisfied( in rather passive, brainless way) with the daily diet of entertainment which it pours forth.
     • " Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.
       • The media is thus an 'enabler' of ideas and meanings, promoting diversity and difference, which might lead to social change (Fiske 1989)
   • Hall's famous 'encodind/decoding' model(1973) suggested that a media producer may 'encode' a certain meaning into their text, which would be based on a certain social context and understanding, but noted that when another person comes to consume that text, their reading('decoding') of it based on their own social context and assumptions is likely to be soemwhat different.
   • Laura Mulvey 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema"
     • scopophilia> a voyeuristic gaze directed at other people
     • narcissistic voyeurism> seeing ourself in primary character and identyfying with them
     • "In a world ordered by sexual inbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female." (1975)

3. Chapter 3- Representations of gender in the past

   • film
     • "Women, in any fully human form, have almost completely been left out of film... The role of a woman in a film almost always resolves around her physical attraction and the mating games ahe plays with the male characters." (Sharon Smith, 1972)
   • magazines
     • 'You could spmetimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her sound like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, or the private vision of mind or spirit that she pusued."( Friedan, 1963)
     • Cosmopolitan was different. First magazine for women focused on them not on family.
   • advertising
     • "The studies show that women in ,agazine adverts priror to the 1970s were rarely shown to be in paid work, and when they were it would usually be a stereotypical role(the smiling secretary or haiddresser)"
     • "Studies in the later 1970s and early 1980s saw a continuation of these trend , with men most often shown at work, and women as housewifes and mothers at home."

4. Chapter 4- Representations of gender today

   • During the 1990s and into the new century gender roles on television seemed to become increasingly equal and non-steretyped- within some limits, although the majority of lead characters were still male.
   • video games
     • In video games the representation of men and women is more stereotyped
     • A study by US college students found that female video games characters were seen as significantly more helpless and sexually provocative compared to male characters, and were not as strong or agressive( Drake, 2007)
   • A study of over 750 prime-time TV ads from spring 1998 conducted by Bartch et al.(200) found that, as in earlier studies, women were twice as likely as men to be in commercials for domestic products, and men were twice as likely as women to appear in ads for non-domestic products.

5. Chapter 5- Giddens, modernity and self-identity

   • Structuration- Human agency(micro level activity) and social structure( macro level forces) continuosly feed into each other. The social stucture is reproduced through repetition of acts by individual people( and tehrefore can change)
     • Giddens recognised that both perspectives had value- and since the 'macro' and 'micro' levels of social life naturally feed into each other, you shouldmn't have to choose between them.
     • Giddens suggests, huamn agency and social structure are in a relationship with each other and it is the repetition of teh acts of individual agents which reproduces teh structure. This means that there is a social structure- traditions, institutions, moral codes and established ways of doing things; but it also means taht these can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them or reproduce them differently.
   • Advertising promotes the idea that products will help us to accent our indiviuality, but of course the market only offers us a cestain range of goods.
     • Consumerism is one of the clearest ways in which we develop and project a lifestyle.
   • People's everyday actions, then, reinforce and reproduce a set of expectations- and it is this set of other people's expectations which make up the 'social forces' and 'social structures' that sociologist talk about.
   • Information and ideas from the media do not merely reflect the social world, then, but contribute to its shape, and are central to modern reflexivity.
   • The point of the book is not to tell screenwriters what their movies should be about, but describes the general way in which a well-told story ahould unfold.
     • The Lego identity study( Guntlett, 2007) found that individuals do indeed use story frames in their understanding of their own lives.

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