...Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone’ (2011) examines and analyzes the changes on how the male and the female are sexually represented. This review will critically look at the arguments of the authors and the research discipline. Also, it will examine the previous literature related to the research topic. Further, the paper will examine the methodology used by the authors to analyses the study. Finally, it will discuss its findings and the contribution of the research to the study field. The study by Hatton and Trautner is an interdisciplinary study about sexuality and gender as well as the media. The above disciplines deals with the representation of sexuality and gender in the media. Also, it looks at how other issues regarding gender and sexuality affect individuals’ and the society. By examination of Braithwaite et al. (2015), it is evident that pornography influences friends and the society. Also, Hall, West and Hill (2012) shows implication of song lyrics on sexuality educators. The authors of the article have several...
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...Running head: RACIALIZED REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE BEAUTY 1 Racialized Representations of Female Beauty in Popular Culture (Name) University of New Mexico RACIALIZED REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE BEAUTY Racialized Representations of Female Beauty in Popular Culture 2 For the past 22 years People magazine has composed a list of the 50 most beautiful people. The list typically includes movie and television stars, musicians, British royalty, models, and television personalities. Every year the magazine crowns the year’s “most beautiful” and features them on the cover. Of the 22 most beautiful 19 have been women and out of the 19 women 16 have been White. This signals to People’s readers that beautiful means White and everything else does not equate beauty. However, this is not unique to People or even magazines like it, but instead represents a larger trend that is present in all forms of Western popular culture. In the various mediums of popular culture, ideologies about female beauty are exceedingly prevalent and constantly managed and reproduced. These ideologies carry with them the notion that in order to obtain ideal female beauty one must be very thin, young, have long hair, and wear expensive or revealing clothing (Stern, 2004). In addition to this there is also a raced definition of beauty, which predominates Western popular culture and dictates that White women with light hair and eye color can only attain true beauty. By looking closely at fashion magazines...
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...Analysis of Miss Representation Miss Representation, a documentary directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, addresses one of the most pressing issues in today’s society: the representation - or, as implied by the title, misrepresentation - of women by the media. In the documentary, Newsom discusses the effect the portrayal of women in the media has on every aspect of the lives of women in America - from women’s perceptions of their bodies to their ability to participate in government. She uses quantitative data, her own story and the stories of other women, famous and not, and various aspects of the visual track to successfully communicate her message that the media’s portrayal and treatment of women is harmful and must be changed in order for...
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...The representation of terrorism, Islam and Muslim identities on popular US series Homeland Introduction Images of Muslim and Islam have dramatically increased in the media coverage as well as popular culture ever since we have entered the “post-9/11 era”, as Elizabeth Poole observed. (2008:81) The shocking real life images from the horrifying terrorist attack in September 2011 has triggered various interpretation on the discourse of what it means to be Muslim and the image of Islam and its culture in the western media, and still have profound influence even after more than a decade and ongoing. Apart from the coverage on news media, TV entertainment, especially TV dramas also provide a powerful outlet for the popular prevailing discourses on Muslim and Islamic culture, which compare to news reports, leaves a more vivid and graphic impression on audience with its discourse and narratives. The proposed subject I am going to study is revolved around the representation of Islam and Muslim identity in the popular US TV drama Homeland. (Showtime, 2011) Homeland (Showtime, 2011) has been arguably the most successful TV series focusing on the theme of counter-terrorism and national security across the Atlantic since 2011, following its predecessor 24 (Fox, 2001) developed by the same producers. When asked what made the show distinctive compared to its predecessors, Damian Lewis, who played as Sgt Nicholas Brody, the male lead in Homeland replied, “We feel a bit differently...
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...Our media is a reflection of our society, and unfortunately our society often mirrors that reflection. How can we claim to be a progressive culture when we regurgitate the same problematic tropes that have plagued our society for centuries? We are always exposed through television, the Internet, movies, radio, advertisements, the—list is endless. Even during infancy, we have internalizing media that has likely been our first exposure to many new concepts. If we take American hegemony into consideration, then our country’s media is being assimilated into countless countries throughout the world. The assimilation of westernized sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia is being internalized by Western and non-Western people alike. Our criticism...
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...22 Carter, C. (2011) “Sex/Gender and the Media: From Sex Roles to Social Construction and Beyond,” in Ross, K. (ed) The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN-10: 1444338544; 365-82. ISBN-13: 978-1444338546 Sex/Gender and the Media From Sex Roles to Social Construction and Beyond Cynthia Carter Introduction In the early years of second-wave western feminism, many gender researchers and feminist scholars distinguished between the notion of sex, defined as biological differences between male and female, and ‘sex roles,’ referring to certain behaviors and characteristics attributed to each sex that was a social construction. The resulting media research centered on images of women in the media (much less emphasis was placed on men) in order to draw attention to inequities in their portrayal in relation to men (in quantitative terms as well as in terms of the use of stereotypes). Since the 1970s, however, the scope of social constructionism has greatly expanded in feminist theory. Some suggest that the distinction between the biological and the social has, as a result, eroded to such an extent that it is no longer possible to understand the difference, while others question the need for this distinction. For instance, in queer and transgender theory and feminist cultural studies, theorists have sought to make strange the ‘sex/gender’ distinction. The key argument made is that biology is no less a cultural construct than gender socialization into...
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...industry (Atkinson & Halliday, 2003), mostly due to the success of rap music, the most widely publicized and marketed aspect. Media such as television and magazines are responsible for hip-hop’s global recognition today, allowing everyone from the United States to Germany and Korea to embrace the culture (Bennett, 1999). Hip-hop culture has made an enormous transition from its beginning stages to its current state. Early hip-hop reduced inner-city gang violence, as aspects such as the break dancing and rapping acted as positive outlets for at-risk youth, but the emergence of “gangsta” and commercial rap during the 1990s severely lessened the emphasis on non-violence (Watkins, 2001). Today, media associate hip-hop culture with drugs, sex, and violence (Yousman, 2003). This research paper will analyze advertisements in hip-hop magazines, with the aim of discovering how women are depicted. Specifically, this paper will examine how the majority of advertisements within three major hip-hop magazines in the United States depict women in a manner that both reinforces male dominance in American society and depicts women as sexual objects. This paper will also explain and demonstrate how the media images are functioning according to Professor George Gerbner’s cultivation theory. Several scholarly sources deal with hip-hop culture and gender biases, as well as the media that stereotype females (Baileyl 2006; Bennett 1999; Boyd 2004; Dixon & Linz 1997; Grossberger, 2003; Jones 1997; Keyes...
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...SEMIOTICS ANALYSIS ESSAY Advertisements are a smart tool and technique used to promote and sell various products. Using mass media, it aims to persuade potential consumers that there is a correlation between the brand and a lifestyle or identity, which is considered enviable.(John Berger, Ways of Seeing) Semiotics, a concept developed by Ferdinand de Saussaure is a useful tool for analysing advertisements. However, Hodge and Kress (year and page number) recommended that semiotic analysis could also be used as a manner of understanding communication, including media texts. The essence of semiotics is ‘the science of signs, or the study of signs and sign systems’ (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2009:133). Media images often emphasize hegemonic representations of gender, race and class in the South African context, and in this specific advertisement BIC reinforced an ideology regarding the manner woman should portray themselves. Using semiotics, I will be deconstructing the advertisement and will argue, through drawing on xy’s concept of racial hegemony, that BIC created an advertisement that reinforces gemonic notions of race, class and gender. . ‘The denotative meaning of an advertisement is the most basic component. This is the most obvious meaning of a sign which can be expressed by describing what is directly seen.’ (Gottdiener, 1995:15) In the BIC advertisement, there is a woman that looks approximately 30 years old. Regarding racial classification, this woman is considered...
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...types of media biases: content bias, where media content shows regular patterns of slant towards specific candidates or ideology, and decision-based bias, where reporters and editors contribute to slant through their personal beliefs and opinions. He also emphasizes how journalists, though nominally barred from allowing personal ideology to permeate into print, often express other non-partisan notions of decision-making bias, such as through candidate competence or momentum. Time as a necessary independent variable allows for shifts in bias to occur, where Entman points to positive coverage of John McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee through the delayed response...
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...GENNDER REPRESENTATION Gender simply means the hierarchical relationship between male and female. Due to the state of being different in sex, the people are assigned roles and viewed at each other differently. This difference starts to exist immediately the child is born, let say through clothes, names, sex and body differences, just to mention few. As the children grows as their gender relations becomes more determined accordingly to their sexes. Gender representation is the way the gender relations are portrayed in different fields to reveal the real gendered life situation in the society, be it in politics, media, education, economic and other fields in the particular society. Music, movies, television radio and magazines as parts of media, gender has been represented through music in this text as follows; This text concerns the representation of gender, or the discourse of gender. If you watch television, walk on the street, wait for the bus or do other things, you are always confronted by images of men and women. In movies, television series and advertisements you see these images and they may influence you consciously or subconsciously. Since media is such a big part of people‘s everyday lives, and is some ways may influence how people perceive themselves and the world, it is interesting to see how representations in movies portray gender. These images, whether it is known or not, may have an important impact upon people‘s lives and how people create their identities. It...
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...University of Banjaluka Faculty of Philology English Language and Literature REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN DISNEY CARTOON PRODUCTION: An Analysis of Selected Examples The purpose of this essay is to explore how media, especially Disney cartoons, affect gender, particularly young girls and how the representations of females within the media affect the viewers through stereotypes or ideals to live up too. THE INTRODUCTION (the explanation of media influences and basic notions of women representations in Disney Production) A good deal of feminist writing in the field of culture has been concerned with the representations of gender and of women in particular, and it is claimed that these representations of females reflected male attitudes and constituted misrepresentations of “real women”. Meehan (1983) analyzed the stereotypes into which women are commonly cast on television and the analysis showed that “good women” are, or are expected to be submissive, domesticated and home-centered while “bad women” are rebellious and independent. She concludes that “American viewers have spent more than three decades watching male heroes and their adventures, muddied visions of boyhood adolescence repete with illusions of women as witches, bitches, mothers and imps “. All researches about the media influence give the same conclusion that the mass media is a powerful resource through which viewers develop their identity and come to understand...
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...me to want to learn more about the representation of women within the art world. As a socially aware individual with an interest in art, I felt the need to explore these inequalities to see if they still exist and how this may impact on other young artists. The research methods that I chose were interview, statistical analysis and content analysis, which would provide me qualitative results, as well as quantitative by being able to collect data and statistics. Originally, I planned on conducting a focus group discussion, however as my project progressed, I decided on content analysis as it allowed me to observe a variety of sources and immerse myself in the art world. By choosing an interview I was able to gain insightful knowledge from four females who were either art curators or historians and one male who is an art historian. This gave me qualitative results as I was able to receive in-depth answers from numerous people and allowed and exploration of my cross-cultural by interviewing both genders and gaining their perspectives on this. However, there were some limitations such as by completing my interviews through e-mail, I was not able to ask any follow up questions for answers to be further elaborated. Additionally I only had one interview with a male and four with females, which may cause more perspectives from females and thus, a gender bias. By conducting interviews it supported my secondary research on the representation of women and by interviewing art historians...
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...Popular culture embraces ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images and phenomena highly influenced by mass media that cater to a large number of common people irrespective of social class and status. It is sensationalist, virtual and consumerist in nature celebrating superficiality. Pop culture expressed through visual images has always been plagued with fetishisation and hyper-sexualisation of bodies represented. Right from the inception, the gendered nature of image culture has invited a sea of criticisms and opinions. Thus the represented space in popular culture, especially if it is in the optic means, can be a useful lens to explore the ideological constructions of a society. Much of popular culture continues to represent women and men in overtly stereotypical ways reproducing predominance of hegemonic masculinity and over-emphasised femininity, placing all other forms of masculinities and femininities in the shadowy background of covert representations. Expressing a serious concern for politicised representations, my thesis focuses on unraveling the ambivalent portraiture of superheroines in the phantasmal world...
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...Canadian-American feminist media critic, blogger, and public speaker. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. She has received particular attention for her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which examines tropes in the depiction of female video game characters. In 2012, Sarkeesian was targeted by an online harassment campaign following her launch of a Kickstarter project to fund the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. At the same time, supporters donated almost $160,000 to the project, far beyond the $6,000 she had sought. The situation was covered extensively in the media, placing Sarkeesian at the center of...
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...Aviva Hurvitz 24 November 2015 Feminism and the Media Representation of Women in the 1970’s Major social change happens when enough people strongly believe in it. The media influences public opinion and thus has the ability to support or destroy these social change movements. In the 1970’s, the second wave feminist movement was attempting to create wide spread social change. Its leading organization, the National Organization for Women (NOW), was focused on dismantling workplace inequality, such as denial of access to better jobs and salary inequity, and protecting women’s rights, such as stopping domestic violence. They attempted to do this through creating legislation and changing public opinion. The media’s representation of women overall at this time counteracted these goals. By creating a derogatory picture of the “feminist”, the media made her unsympathetic to the public. Rather than creating support for the core goals of the feminist movement, the media focused on more controversial topics, specifically gay rights. This negative media coverage of the women’s movement hurt its ability to implement meaningful legislation, such as the Equal Rights Amendment. The way in which print media degraded women, demonized feminists, and connected feminism to controversial topics damaged the progress of second wave feminism in the 1970’s. The definition of a feminist is a person who believes in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes (Miriam Webster...
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