What I will do:
My aim is to analyse and document secondary research through college library books and online Google books, addressing gender in the media. I will gather relevant quotations and supportive content and link them to the hypothesises within my investigation. I will try to find both supportive and challenging content to create a solid and balanced argument.
How this will benefit my investigation:
This task will help me to revise the essential key concepts of textual analysis, terminology and stereotypical gender roles. Fundamentally, the quotations that I find will be useful to incorporate into my written essay piece because they will support/challenge controversial statements.
Books of study:
- An Introduction to theories of Popular Culture by Dominic Strinati
- Imagining Women, Cultural Representations and Gender by Frances Bonner
Quotation:
‘Women are either absent or represented in
terms of stereotypes based upon sexual attractiveness and the performance of
domestic labour. In short, women are ‘symbolically annihilated’ by the media
through being absent, condemned or trivialised.’ pg. 180
Meaning:
This reinforces the notion that women are the passive gender and men are the active. This can be applied to Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines music video because there are three male singers, fully clothed, respected and dominant vs three naked women who are presented as sexual objects in the video with no other role than to look attractive and be looked at through the male gaze. This also recognises how women have become triviliased in comparison to men are considered 'beneath', 'below' or 'the other'.
Quotation:
‘The ‘symbolic annihilation of women’
practiced by the mass media serves to confirm that the roles of the wife,
mother and housewife etc. are the fate of women in a patriarchal society.'
Meaning:
Establishes female stereotypical gender roles and occupations which often regard cleaning, cooking and waiting under men (motherly and nurturing roles).This quotation recognises that this is the result of patriarchal societies because there is always a social hierarchy and women are viewed as less important than the other sex. The 'symbolic annihilation of women' refers to how society has accepted this oppressed view of women and, essentially, women's rights to hold power will always be frowned upon and considered irrelevant.
Quotation:
Van Zoonen: ‘Numerous quantative content analyses have shown that women hardly
appear in the mass media, be it depicted as wife, mother, daughter, girlfriend;
as working in traditionally female jobs (secretary, nurse, receptionist); or as
sex-object… It is thought that media perpetuate sex role stereotypes because
they reflect dominant social values and also because male media producers are
influenced by these stereotypes.’
Meaning:
Reiterates stereotypical/traditional/sexist female occupations which undermine their intellect. Quotation suggests that male producers do this purposely to exemplify male dominance and establish the patriarchy.
Quotation:
'This symbolic annihilation of women is confirmed by the adverts shown on
television. Analyses of television commercials support the reflection of this
hypothesis. In voice-overs and one-sex (all male or all female) ads,
commercials neglect or stereotype women. In their portrayal of women, the ads
banish females to the role of house-wife, mother, homemaker, and sex objects,
limiting the roles women may play in society.’ pg. 183
Meaning:
Evidence supports the notion that there is a lack of female presence and influence in the media, in particular, in Television. The statistics used are very dated and therefore unreliable to today's media, however these statistics can be used contextually.
Quotation:
'This characterisation of women as body and emotion has been used to place women in connection with the home, the family and our supposedly caring duties.This dualistic thinking has also extended into binaries used in the evaluation of art (such as decorative or functional) which can be added to the basic dichotomies to create evaluations of women being regarded as emotional, sensuous, colourful, ornamental, derivative and decorative.'
Meaning:
The idea of women being 'decorative' and 'ornamental' connotes the message that a woman's only importance is her body image and appearance. This links to the Blurred Lines music video which has been critiqued by many viewers (and feminists) saying that the women have been used to make the video more visually pleasing. Ultimately, the women are used as sexual objects to draw in a male audience.
