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Part I
HER/HISTORIES
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1
Media and the representation of gender
Margaret Gallagher
Image and reality
âHow can the media be changed? How can we free women from the tyranny of media messages limiting their lives to hearth and home?â Media sociologist Gaye Tuchman ends her celebrated essay âThe Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Mediaâ with these two questions (Tuchman 1978: 38). Straightforward, confident, and unambiguous, from todayâs vantage point the questions may seem naĂŻve in their formulation. Yet in essence they encapsulate the concerns that continue to drive much feminist media analysis around the world almost four decades later. Despite enormous transformations in national and global media landscapes, and the development of infinitely more sophisticated approaches to media analysis and theorizing, the fundamental issues remain those that preoccupied Tuchman and her colleagues: power, values, representation, and identity.
Feminist cultural politics is a common thread running through much work on image and representation, from its origins to the present. The edited collection Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, in which Tuchmanâs âsymbolic annihilationâ essay appears, was motivated by âan interest in the progress we are making toward the full social equality of womenâ and by âthe rise of the womenâs movementâ (Kaplan Daniels 1978: v). These early analyses argued that the US media are deeply implicated in the patterns of discrimination operating against women in societyâpatterns which, through the absence, trivialization or condemnation of women in media content, amounted to their âsymbolic annihilation.â The term, originally coined by George Gerbner in 1972, became a powerful and widely used metaphor to describe the ways in which media images make women invisible. This mediated invisibility, it was argued, is achieved not simply through the non-representation of womenâs points of view or perspectives on the world. When women are âvisibleâ in media content, the manner of their representation reflects the biases and assumptions of those who define the publicâand therefore the mediaâagenda.
Much of this early work attempted to establish the extent to which media content departed from âreality.â Some of the earliest analysis was driven by personal experience. In the early 1960s, former magazine journalist Betty Friedan, introducing her study of how the cultural definition of femininity in the USA shifted between the 1940s and 1950s, explained: âThere was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystiqueâ (Friedan 1963: 9). A decade later, more systematic studies of basic stereotypes were providing a basis from which to argue that the media provided idealized versions of femininity that were âfalse.â For instance, the editors of Hearth and Home concluded: âTelevised images of women are in large measure false, portraying them less as they really are, more as some might want them to beâ (Franzwa 1978: 273).
Despite the use of terms that today we might find lack nuance, these early studies were not necessarily as unsophisticated as they are sometimes characterized. The notion that women were being portrayed âas some might want them to beâ theorizes the media as part of a system âthat cultivates the images fitting the established structure of social relations,â a system whose function is to create cultural resistance to changeâin this case, change in the status of women (Gerbner 1978: 46â8). Gerbner identifies three main tactics of resistance to change used in media imagery of womenâdiscrediting, isolating, and undercutting. He says that the result is a âcounterattack on the womenâs movement as a social force for structural changeâ (1978: 50). Betty Friedan, too, was concerned with the interplay between media images, social change, and gender identity. Asking why the âspirited New Womanâ who dominated womenâs magazines of the 1940s had, by the 1950s, given way to the âhappy Housewife Heroine,â while, over the same period, educational and employment opportunities for middle-class white American women had greatly expanded, she concluded: âWhen a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of cultureâ (Friedan 1963: 53). What many of these early studies were grappling with, without naming it as such, was the ideological role of the media.
Ideology and representation
In many respects the contemporary field of feminist media scholarship looks vastly different from the relatively straightforward terrain occupied by the âwomen and mediaâ studies of the 1970s and 1980s. The inadequacies of studies that conflate the condition of white, heterosexual, middle-class women with the condition of all women are now acknowledged, and contemporary media research has tried to grapple with more complex understandings of gender identity and experience. As Marsha Houston has put it:
Women of color do not experience sexism in addition to racism, but sexism in the context of racism; thus they cannot be said to bear an additional burden that white women do not bear, but to bear an altogether different burden from that borne by white women.
(Houston 1992: 49)
Most early studies of âwomen and mediaâ had analyzed only womenâs representation, thereby appearing to assume that the representation of menâs experience was unproblematic. As feminist media critique developed and deepened, it became clear that masculinity was also represented in quite specific ways in media content. Rosalind Gill contends that studies of masculinities developed as a direct result of feminismâs critique, literally âtransforming research on women and media into something that is properly about gender and mediaâ (2007: 32; see also Carter 2012).
The crossing of intellectual and disciplinary boundaries that characterizes much of todayâs work can actually be traced back to some of most creative points of departure in feminist media studies. As far back as 1977 Noreen Janus critiqued the theoretical shortcomings of white, middle-class, liberal research into âsex-role stereotypes.â Janus advocated more holistic studies of media content, allied with analyses of the economic imperatives of the media industries and with studies of the perceptions of different audience groups, and the linking of media-related questions to other kinds of social analysis. This type of integrated interdisciplinary research agenda will seem familiar to many feminist media scholars today. Yet its implementation has demanded the location and articulation of a distinct feminist voice. This has involved a difficult and protracted struggle to achieve intellectual legitimacy within the general field of media and communication studies (see Gallagher 2003).
A move towards analyses of the socioeconomic contexts of media structures and processes during the 1990s signaled feminismâs recognition that media representations and gender discourses take shape within particular, and changing, socioeconomic formations which must themselves be analyzed and understood. Indeed, one of feminismâs significant contributions to the overall field has been its emphasis on the relationship between gender and class. The interplay between gender and class in the creation of contemporary consumerist identities was central to much feminist scholarship of the 1990s (for example Basu 2001; Nag 1991). By demonstrating how, in an era of globalizing capitalism, âmiddle-class women in particular are at the epicentre of the unfolding struggle over the terms of (the) transitionâ towards consumer modernity, feminist research provided an important entry point for a revitalized and urgently needed class analysis of contemporary change in the organization of communications and culture (Murdock 2000: 24). For instance, studies of the effects of the German unification process on media structures and content noted a new emphasis on women as mothers and housewives, although in the former German Democratic Republic media portrayals generally depicted women as capable of combining paid employment and family life (Rinke 1994). Data from Central and Eastern Europe suggested that the transformations of 1989 and the adaptation of the media to market-oriented demands resulted in previously absent representations of women that emphasized sexuality, mixing entrenched patriarchal conventions with new sexist language and images (Ibroscheva and Stover 2012; Zabelina 1996; Zarkov 1997).
Going beyond the issue of socioeconomic formations, feminists also grappled with the wider concept of political ideology, focusing on how womenâs representation is frequently a site on which wider, public meanings are inscribed. At the simplest level, it is clear that in all parts of the world, at different times in history, representations and images of women have been used as symbols of political aspirations and social change. An obvious example was the widespread use of particular asexual, âemancipatedâ female images in Soviet culture: the confident, sturdy woman on her tractor, on the farm, or in the factory. Images of this kind reflected an idealized political vision: âthe social realist tradition was intended to create an ideal reality and utilized this model to portray the exemplary woman of the radiant Communist futureâ (Lipovskaya 1994: 124; see also Ibroscheva and Stover 2012). In such a situation female imagery becomes a metaphor for a particular political ideology, rather than a representation of womenâs lives.
A clear contemporary example of these political and ideological tensions is to be found in media representations of veiled Muslim women (see Jiwani 2005; Macdonald 2006). In the wake of 9/11, images of women in chadors, burqas, and hijabs proliferated in the Western media. Feminist analysis has focused on how these images have been used to justify wars of âliberationâ in Afghanistan and Iraq (Stabile and Kumar 2005; Winegar 2005). Evelyn Alsultany has analyzed these images in terms of its âideological workâ in justifying political agendas and the so-called war on terror (2012). She argues that apparently sympathetic representations of oppressed Muslim women feed a public sense of outrage:
If we are outraged at the treatment of the oppressed Muslim woman, we are far more likely to support U.S. interventions in Muslim countries in the name of saving the women.⌠This highly mediated evocation of outrage for the plight of the oppressed Muslim woman inspires support of U.S. interventions against Muslim men and barbaric Islam.
(Alsultany 2012: 99)
Alsultany concludes that media representations of Muslim women and Muslim men are âmirror imagesâ of one another, encouraging public sympathy for the former and moral disengagement from the latter. Crucial to the impact of these âsimplified complex representations,â she argues, is the way in which discourses of multiculturalism and feminism have been co-opted by the media and by political institutions. This co-optation, she contends, has âhelped to form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practicesâ (Alsultany 2012: 16).
Feminist discourse and media empowerment
The âtyranny of media messagesâ against which pioneers of feminist criticism railed has, over the past half-century, given way to something infinitely more complex and sophisticated. Contemporary media content frequently draws on and invokes feminism itself, and feminist vocabulary, in a âpost-feministâ discourse implying that feminism has been âtaken into accountâ (McRobbie 2009: 12). The result is a paradox. On the one hand, ostensibly feminism has become part of the cultural field. On the other, modern media narratives frequently present feminism as irrelevant to todayâs social struggles, and indeed as something to be repudiatedâalbeit often in a humorous or ironic tone, which of course makes feminist counter-critique particularly difficult (Gill 2007: 268).
With few exceptions, however, feminist discourse in the media remains conservative. Relying heavily on notions of womenâs individual choice, empowerment and personal freedom, it fits perfectly within a vocabulary of neoliberalism. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie describes this as âdisarticulationââa process which, through its insistent focus on female individualism and consumerism, unpicks the seams of connection between groups of women who might find common cause, and âmakes unlikely the forging of alliances, affiliations or connections,â whether locally, nationally, or internationally (2009: 26). This analysis is shared by feminist theorist Nancy Fraser, who distinguishes between feminism as a social movement and feminism as discourse (2009). In the context of neoliberal capitalism, Fraser argues, feminism in the discursive sense has âgone rogue.â As a result, todayâs feminist movement is âincreasingly confronted with a strange shadowy version of itself, an uncanny double that it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavowâ (Fraser 2009: 114).
These twenty-first-century paradoxes and contradictionsâin particular the incorporation of feminist ideas into media discourseâoblige feminists to confront the question of how, despite apparent changes, media images and representations intertwine with political and social ideologies to reaffirm relatively stable gender positions in society. For although media narratives regularly suggest that the struggles launched by the womenâs movement of the 1970s are no longer relevant, no country in the world has achieved gender equality. The 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, which since 2006 has measured progress on tackling gender gaps in health, education, economic and political participation, found that in 13 of the 111 countries for which it had data (12 percent), the overall gender gap has actually widened since 2006 (Hausmann et al. 2012: 17).
This tension between the lived experience of inequality and its representation in the media is as obvious today as it was 50 years ago. For example, the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), which acknowledged the media as one of 12 âcritical areas of concernâ that stand in the way of gender equality, was a breakthrough. It moved beyond the concept of womenâs âadvancementâ (within taken-for-granted, existing structures) as expressed in earlier international documents, to that of womenâs âempowermentâ (implying the potential to transform those structures). The empowerment of women, as advocated in the BPfA, is a radical demand. It depends on âthe full realization of all human rights and fundamental freedoms of all womenâ (United Nations 1995: para. 9). Yet in the years after Beijing the concept was soon emptied of its radical essence. Empowerment became âthe word of the momentâ across a range of social and political institutions, including the media.
It is a stripped-out, neutered version of âwomenâs empowermentâ that we find in a great deal of contemporary media discourse, which explicitly equates empowerment with sexual assertiveness, buying power, and individual control. For instance, the Dove âCampaign for Real Beauty,â devised by advertising agency Ogilvie & Mather, in its later stages involved online contests that promised women âempowermentâ and âcreative controlâ by contributing their own advertisements to promote the Dove Supreme Cream Oil Body Wash (Duffy 2010). In this highly conservative version of empowerment, which chimes fully with the neoliberal economic model, gender equality becomes confused with individual âlifestyleâ choices. Told that âyou have the power to be what you want to be,â the modern media woman responds logically: âToday. I decided to stop being fat. My decision. My weight lossâ (Lazar 2006: 510). The false-feminist rhetoric in these exhortations to exercise âchoiceâ gives the illusion of progress, while reaffirming the age-old centrality of the female body in media discourse.
As for feminist discourse, this has been incorporated in various ways across all media genresâfrom advertising to newspapers to television. Analyzing those global patterns of incorporation is central to a large body of contemporary feminist scholarship (for example Ball 2012; Mendes 2012; Bucciferro 2012). These developments have resulted in a vast diversity of media content which, in terms of the challenge it presents for critical practice, is immeasurably more complicated than that which confronted the first feminist media scholars.
Activism, scholarship, and change
In the final part of her groundbreaking study of gender and media, Rosalind Gill turns to the issue of feminist cultural politics. Recalling the strategies of activism used in the 1970s and 1980s, she asks what kind o...
