Media, Religion and Gender

Key Issues and New Challenges

Mia Lövheim, Mia Lövheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134074907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Media, Religion and Gender presents a selection of eminent current scholarship that explores the role gender plays when religion, media use and values in contemporary society interact. The book:

• surveys the development of research on media, religion and culture through the lens of key theoretical and methodological issues and debates within gender studies.

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• includes case studies drawn from a variety of countries and contexts to illustrate the range of issues, theoretical perspectives and empirical material involved in current work

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• outlines new areas and reflects on challenges for the future.

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Students of media, religion and gender at advanced level will find this a valuable resource, as will scholars and researchers working in this important and growing field.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Gender – a blind spot in media, religion and culture?

Mia Lövheim

At the beginning of 2011 the whole world watched the events of what has been termed the “Arab spring” in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and other countries of the Middle East. These events have been seen as symbols of the recent “resurgence” of religion in international politics and in the media, and hailed as a sign of the power of digital grassroots media with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and mobile phones playing a key role. But equally significant is the prominence of gender in the media representations and mediated practices of these events. One example is “the girl in the blue bra” story, initiated by an amateur video shoot on December 17, 2011, showing a young woman being beaten and dragged through the streets by uniformed soldiers during a protest in Cairo. In the turmoil, her clothing is ripped and her blue bra is clearly displayed. The image spurred an outrage nationally and internationally against the violence of the Egyptian military during the protests, but also against the systematic degradation of women in the country. In the coverage of this story, images of women protesters with and without veils, standing side by side, are prominent (Higgins 2011). Another example rooted in these events concerns the reporting on the role of young Muslim women in the protests. In 2011 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to three women for “their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work” (Nobel Peace Prize 2011). One of them was Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, founder of the network “Women Journalists Without Chains,” and one of several young female journalists and bloggers who have been hailed for raising their voices against military violence and dictatorship, but also against religiously informed social and political structures upholding inequality and oppression of women’s rights and values. Remarkably, the picture chosen to represent Karman among the revolving images on the head banner of the Nobel Peace Prize website shows her looking into a mirror and adjusting her veil.

Gender is a concept with several meanings, which are connected but also deeply contested during the history of feminist politics and research. A simple working definition of gender would be as a social construct defining the attributes, behavior and roles that are generally associated with men or women. Gender is thus derived from but different than biological sex. However, as the later history of feminist theory has shown, gender can hardly be “defined” once and for all but is rather constructed in the relation between biological genitalia and hormones defining male and female bodies, the socially and culturally constructed values and norms attached to these physical markers, and the individual and social identities and actions enacted out of these. Gender, thus, is also constructed by the social and political implications of ascribing men and women certain positions, characteristics and value based on biological sex. According to Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman (1990) gender as a social and cultural system is structured according to two fundamental logics: that there are two categories – men and women – which are fundamentally different, and that one of these categories – men – is superior to the other. Feminist politics and research has challenged primarily the second of these. Queer theory and politics challenges the first, and thereby has drawn gender studies into new and challenging questions.

All of these complexities make it clear, first of all, that gender is at the heart of culture, conceived as the way and forms through which human beings make meaning out of their social and material existence (see Hall et al. 1980). As pointed out by Pamela Klassen (2009: 2–3) gender is simultaneously a fundamental source for structuring identities, traditions, values and rituals within religious traditions and an unstable and contested category questioning these distinctions. Gender also deeply informs the production of media texts, the symbols circulated through media and popular culture, as well as the uses of these texts (see Gill 2007, Gauntlett 2002). But as the examples above from the Arab Spring show, the ways in which gender is represented and interpreted in media texts and practices are becoming more complex. Not least when these representations also involve religion. Both of these examples highlight how stereotypical conceptions of gender, religion, power and oppression – here of Muslim women as oppressed and veiled – on the one hand are reproduced in news reporting. On the other hand, they become challenged with the introduction of new media technology which is ascribed a key role in fighting social and political structures upholding inequality and oppression of women’s rights and values. The outcome is, as both examples show, ambiguous and complex. What is changing, and what is not? What is the meaning of this combination of images and texts representing women’s agency and exploitation as connected to a powerful religious symbol such as the veil? What are the implications for analyzing the potentials of new media technology for critical and multiple articulations of religion, not least if we add also the heritage of colonialism and the powers of commercial global media actors to the question? There are no given answers on how to analyze and interpret these questions. However, they clearly show how gender as a dimension of media representations and media practice can no longer be ignored if we are to understand the interplay between religion, media and culture in late modern society. As gender highlights the complexities of bodies, social relations, cultural conventions and individual agency in mediations of religion, why should gender not be important and make a difference in our studies?

Media, religion and culture

The research field media, religion and culture was initiated in the mid 1990s in order to facilitate and develop cross-disciplinary research between sociology of religion/religious studies, media and communication studies and cultural studies (Hoover and Lundby 1997a). Since the early 1990s, research undertaken within the field has been crucial in placing religion on the agenda of media studies, and media on the agenda of religious studies (see Engelke 2010). Furthermore, there has been an exponential growth of academic literature in the field. However, a review of the published works over the first decade of the new field (1997– 2007) reveals that gender, by and large, has remained a neglected theme. The international, biennial conferences on Media, Religion and Culture (CMRC), initiated in Uppsala, Sweden in 1993, have been of central importance for the formation of the field.¹ Presentations and publications emanating from these conferences as well as the series “Media and Religion” (published by Routledge) can, arguably, be seen as the main public expressions of the subject matter. A review of the edited conference volumes, papers and panels, as well as related journals, showed that publications that explicitly discuss gender and/or use theories with a gender perspective are scarce (Lövheim 2008). Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (Hoover and Lundby 1997b), published in 1997, includes one chapter by Clare Badaracco, aptly entitled “A Utopian on the Main Street,” which introduces new approaches within feminist theology. Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Hoover and Clark 2002), published in 2002, has no chapter that explicitly focuses on gender issues. However, both Diane Winston’s chapter on the performed religion of the Salvation Army 1880–1920 and Erica Doss’ chapter on popular religious practices of belief in Elvis brings out the significance of gender in these processes and practices. While Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture (Mitchell and Marriage 2003) has no chapter that analyzes gender, Implications of the Sacred in (Post) Modern Media (Sumiala-Seppänen et al. 2006) includes a gendered analysis of the film As in Heaven (Hammer 2006). The collection Religion, Media and the Public Sphere (Meyer and Moors 2005), closely related by theme, also includes one chapter discussing gender and politics in Palestinian family law (Moors 2005). Turning to more recent publications in the series “Media, Religion and Culture,” the volume Keywords in Media, Religion and Culture (Morgan 2008) features no chapter explicitly addressing gender, while Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader (2011) includes one chapter by Diane Winston on the dynamics of religion, media, gender and commodification in the Salvation Army.

In 2002 the first issue of the quarterly Journal of Media and Religion was published. A search for keywords on the website of the journal from 2002 to 2007 shows 13 hits for articles on “gender” and “women.”² In nine of these articles, gender is included as a factor in the analysis of survey data on media use and media attitudes (see e.g. Haskell 2007). Only two of the articles explicitly discuss gender: Hillary Warren’s (2002) analysis of depictions of race, gender and authority in the children’s video series Veggie Tales, and Claudia Schippert’s (2007) analysis of gender and sexuality in the sanctification of the priest and 9/11 victim Mychal Judge. During the same period, the online Journal of Religion and Popular Culture published seven articles focusing on gender: for example, Rebecca Barrett’s article on what women gain from reading Christian romance novels (2003). In a parallel review of articles in the Journal of Communication and Religion during 1999–2009, Helen Sterk (2010) concludes that the intersection of gender, communication and religion remains an undeveloped area in the journal’s publication history. During these 10 years, 43 articles were written by women or included some form of gender analysis. However, only nine conducted gender-based analysis and seven used categories from feminist research to frame or theorize findings and arguments. The amount of publications from women scholars had increased during the period but was still only 30 percent of the contributions.

These reviews make clear that gender has been a marginal issue in central publications presenting research on media, religion and culture. However, as the reviews in the next two chapters show important research on media and religion inspired by gender perspectives has been carried out within the field, and more publications including gender perspectives have begun to appear during recent years. Nevertheless, there is yet no publication that explicitly addresses the significance of gender in the production, circulation and daily use of mediated religion.³ The aim of this volume is to fill this gap.

Marginalizing gender: reasons and concerns

Why, then, is research that focuses on the experiences of women or analyzes the interplay between media, religion and contemporary culture from a gender perspective so invisible in the field? There are, of course, several possible and interconnected reasons for this situation. The historical legacy of gendered rules and traditions structuring the positions of men and women within academic life plays an important part, as well as conceptions of gender and the place of feminist studies within dominant discourses of particular scholarly disciplines. Without forgetting the complexity of the question, it seems relevant for the purpose and focus of this book to address the last of these reasons, meaning the place of gender within the disciplines that were once brought together to form the new field of research: studies of “media,” “religion” and “culture.” To survey these disciplines in all their depth and complexity is, needless to say, a task that would take several books of their own (see Klassen, Goldberg and Lefebvre 2009). Therefore, the following discussion will necessarily be brief and limited to a few significant points that reveal some of the reasons for the lack of gender analysis in the field.

Media and gender

In their critical agenda for “rethinking media, religion and culture” Stewart Hoover and Knut Lundby (1997a: 6, 9) argue that a shift in media studies is needed from research that focuses on media as institutions and the symbolic production of messages toward processes of consumption and interpretation. This argument shows how the new field emerged alongside a “culturalist turn” in media studies from the 1980s and onwards (Hoover 2002, White 1983). This shift implied a critique of theories and methods drawing on a transmission model of the media and focusing on the “effects” or the persuasive power of the media in shaping values and relations. In short, it instigated an emphasis on the contexts and situations of meaning construction, thus, on the complexity of the meaning of media texts, and a focus on reception and on media use as embedded in everyday lived experiences.

Although this shift opened up more complex and nuanced understandings of the role of media in meaning making, and of the significance of the particular social and cultural context of media consumption, gender has for the most part remained an “add on” dimension, and few studies have so far ventured beyond a descriptive level of gender differences in media use (see, further, the chapters by Lövheim and Clark and Chiou). A thorough and more critical analysis of how gender shapes representations of religion in media as well as individual use of the media in everyday religious practice is necessary to understand, for example, if and how the mediatization of religion, meaning the shift from religious institutions to popular culture and the media as the prime channels, language and arenas for religion (Hjarvard 2008), can challenge patterns of authority and normative boundaries established by traditional religious discourses (see Byerly and Ross 2006).

Religion and gender

Hoover and Lundby (1997a: 8) also argue for a shift of focus in studies of religion from the forms and doctrines of institutional religion to the meaning making practices of everyday life. This argument echoes the debate in sociology of religion and religious studies about the thesis that modernization necessarily implies a secularization of society, and the subsequent call for a “new paradigm” for studies of transformations of religion in late modern societies (Davie 2007). The focus on institutional religion has implied a bias concerning, first, the location of religion in modern society. As argued by James Beckford, although religion in late modern western societies is still to a large extent practiced through institutions, it has increasingly “come adrift from its former points of anchorage and become a cultural resource” (1989: 170). This shift has been a main concern in previous work in media, religion and culture exploring how media and religion increasingly have come to occupy a “common turf” of “the everyday world of lived experiences” (Hoover 2006) and form temporal “sacred spaces” for the negotiation of meaning, identities and social relationships. Research on “lived religion” (Orsi 1997, McGuire 1997, Ammerman 2007), where religion is seen as “a form of cultural work,” has also contributed to an understanding and analysis of religious meaning as constructed in the practices of media use (see Hoover et al. 2004, Clark 2003) or in the act of seeing (Morgan 2005) rather than encoded in texts.

This development has meant that a broader variety of expressions of religion, such as embodied, affective and aesthetic aspects of religious life, have been included in the analysis (Lynch et al. 2011: 3). However, as pointed out by Meredith McGuire (1997: 96), the understanding of religion and religiosity underpinning western, academic discourse is largely modeled after the experiences and interests of a male, religious elite. The experiences and practices of women and other groups that have traditionally made up the silent majority in religions have largely been left out of the picture (Woodhead 2001).

Thus, even though research in media, religion a...