I. Wood, Julia T. “Gendered media: The influence of media on views of gender.” Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture 9 (1994): 231-244.
There are several factors which influence our thoughts on gender. Of all these factors, media are most prevalent and one of the most powerful elements which govern our thoughts on men and women in society. Media embed their messages into our minds through various ways in all spheres of life. This document portrays the way in which all forms of media communicate images of the sexes, many of which perpetuate unrealistic, stereotypical and limiting perceptions. It primarily focuses on three major themes, which describe how media represent gender:
- Under-representation of women.
- Stereotypical portrayals of women and men.
- Stereotypical images of relationships between men and women.
First, media under-represents women by showcasing a distortion in the number and roles of male and female characters in prime-time television, children’s programming, etc. This distortion temps us to believe that men really dominate women and, further, that men are the cultural and societal standard. Second, stereotypical gender-based perceptions are formed through television programmes, in which men are presented as hard, tough, independent, aggressive, unafraid, violent, totally in control of all emotions, and, above all, in no way feminine. On the other hand, women are typically represented pursuing roles of homemaking, cooking, child care, etc. Third, the relationships between man and women are also depicted in ways that reinforce stereotypes, under themes like women’s dependence/men’s independence, women as caregivers/men as breadwinners, men’s authority/women’s incompetence and women as victims/men as aggressors. So, this text will dispense the reader with an overall idea of the role of media in shaping our thoughts on gender.
URL: Link: http://www1.udel.edu/comm245/readings/GenderedMedia.pdfRationale for selecting this material
II. Kanai, Akane. “Sociality and classification: Reading gender, race, and class in a humorous meme.” Social Media + Society 2.4 (2016): 2056305116672884.
This article is based on the anonymous Tumblr blog, WhatShouldWeCallMe (WSWCM), wherein the meme narrates feelings and reactions related to youthful, feminine, Western everyday experience through the use of captions and GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) images. The author suggests that the practices of readerly participation in the meme require a social rather than an individual set of competencies and knowledge. In the meme, the reader relates the sense of joke by aligning an ostensibly incongruous GIF and caption, remixing and matching existing classifications of people, bodies, and objects in terms of gender, race or class. It demonstrates the ways in which social inequalities are indexed without explicitly being recognised. The author has explored how the fundamental aspects of identity like gender, race and class are deployed as discrete elements that may be seen or unseen, in order for the humorous punchline to be transacted. The author has introduced a form of readership, named “spectatorial girlfriends”, which reflects a social positioning required to recognize the narratives parcelled in the texts, combined with a classificatory proficiency with which to read the mode of the narration.
This text will give the reader an idea about the importance of modern digital social media content like meme as means of understanding media cultures, their significance, and their connections with the everyday life of the masses. The reader shall appreciate identifying how meanings attached to identity are made and normalized. The author has highlighted that feminist scholars in this discipline have particularly sought to understand how female audiences have read or interpreted media texts, identifying their pleasures, resistances, and uses, rather than attributing an ahistorical or apolitical discrete meaning to texts.
URL: Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2056305116672884Rationale for selecting this material
III. Ruth Schwartz Cowan. “The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century.” Technology and Culture, vol. 17, no. 1, 1976, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3103251 .
In the aforementioned text, the author has described the intersections between technology and society in terms of “Industrial Revolution in the Home”, rather than exploring grandiose terms like invasion of massive computers, emergence of railroad tracks and establishment of automated factory units. The author has discussed the constitution and structure of families during pre-industrialization as well as post-industrialization periods, thereby dwelling upon the changing roles of women, as housewives, with emergence of technology. The pre-industrial families were mostly self sustaining. So, women had a lot to do and their time was almost entirely absorbed by household tasks. However, in post-industrial families, women had very less work to do and the tasks with which they used to fill their time had lost the social utility, which was very prominent during the pre-industrial period. This was because industrial technology had either eliminated or eased most of their former functions. The author has focused upon several such instances to exemplify the changing roles of women in the society with emergence of technology during 20th century. The text also focuses upon changes in structure of households, and thereby the role of women, due to technological change in household appliances like electric iron, washing machines, etc. The changes in the routine of a housewife in an average middle class family has been clearly described with change in technology. The process of industrialization also led to decline in number of household assistants. This further changed the role of a woman, as housewife. She was expected to demonstrate competence at several tasks that previously had not been in her purview. The text also highlights the consumption of economic goods as an example of housewife’s expanded job description. The author tries to build upon a model to develop correlation between changing nature of household work and several indicators of social change. Further, the role of advertisers as a connecting link between social and technological change has also been highlighted.
The readers will get an in-depth idea of how technological changes during 20th century led to change in the roles of women as housewives, and the consequent impacts from a wide range of view, supported by relevant arguments, examples and statistical figures. The author describes this sociological analysis as a cultural artifact of vast importance.
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3103251.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4f69170f01a634a4bb3979f 257780fd6
IV. TED Talk: Social Media and the end of gender, TEDWomen 2010 Speaker: Johanna Blakley
In this talk, the speaker emphasizes upon the role of new media in dismantling some of the demeaning stereotypes about gender that are exhibited in media and advertising. The segmentation methods used by most of the media companies in order to understand their respective audience has been focused upon. The media companies believe that if one falls within a certain demographic category then he/she is predictable in certain ways. However, the speaker highlights the use of psychographics (i.e., modelling the complex psychological profiles of consumers) instead of conventional demographics based on gender, age, etc. All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the one of the conventional demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. However, with the emergence of new media and online networking tools, these categories are of much lesser importance and it is easy for people to escape several demographic boxes. So, it is becoming difficult for the traditional media companies to understand these online communities, as they are still trying to use the conventional demographics. The speaker further elucidates the importance of psychographics by providing an example of basis of aggregation of people in online communities. People don’t aggregate on the basis of age, gender and income. They aggregate on the basis of their interests or the things they like. It has been reiterated that shared interests and values are far more powerful aggregators of human beings than demographic categories. Further, with the help of relevant statistics, the speaker shows that women outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies in terms of amount of time that they spend on these sites. Consequently, the effect of domination of women in the social media space has been discussed at some length.
This talk will encourage the audience to think about the basis on which media and advertising companies categorise people into different spheres. It will also offer the audience a chance to dwell upon how these bases of categorization have been changing over time with the emergence of different forms of mass media and its impact on the roles of people in different demographic categories.
URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_social_media_and_the_end_of_gender#t-481351
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