Feminist Media Studies: 9 (Media Culture & Society series)

Product Information

Stereotyping tends to occur where there are inequalities of power, as subordinate or excluded groups are constructed as different or ‘other’ (e.g. through ethnocentrism). Women’s bodies are used in media products as a spectacle for heterosexual male audiences, which reinforces patriarchal hegemony

Zelizer, B. (2005) “Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events,” in E. Rothenbuhler and M. Coman (eds) Media Anthropology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Feminism was mostly ignored in studies of mass communication until issues such as sexuality, verbal harassment, body beauty and the study of ‘women genres’ became more politically and socially important. Andrea Mauri, Achilleas Psyllidis, Alessandro Bozzon, Ju Sung Lee, Jason Pridmore, Liesbet Van Zoonen & Sarah Giest (2021) - Complementing studies on vulnerable youths with reddit data - doi: 10.1145/3464385.3464703 - [link] Hoover, S. and Clark, L.S. (eds) (2002) Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.Gender is constructed through codes and conventions of media products, and the idea of what is male and what is female changes over time Linenthal, E. (2001) The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, New York: Oxford University Press. Representations are constructed through media language, and reflect the ideological perspective of the producer Because of this, we are now in a situation that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent. This concept is referred to as 'hyperreality'

All media products have an underlying structure, and knowledge of this structure helps us to analyse them. Hjarvard, S. (2008a) “The Mediatization of Religion: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social Change,” Northern Lights, 6: 9-26. In patriarchal culture, the way women’s bodies are represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies as spectacle. McRobbie, Angela. 2008. The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. London: SAGE. Kraidy, M. (2009) Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Johnston, R. (ed.) (2007) Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. And in this the mass media play a crucial role in socialisation in teaching us how to behave and think in ways that our culture finds acceptable. Van Zoonen believes the media portray images of stereotypical women and this behaviour reinforces societal views. The media does this because they believe it reflects dominant social values (what people believe in) and male producers are influenced by this. This is a patriarchy (a society ran by men for men) which dominates and oppresses women. Being exposed to repeated patterns of representation over long periods of time can shape and influence the way in which people perceive the world around them (i.e. cultivating particular views and opinions) Feminists are particularly interested in the contribution made by the media to society’s dominant ideas about gender roles.

The concept of “data steering” in the social domain unites the steering discourse and current data rhetoric with a very specific outcome: it suggests that factual data and their recognizable patterns will generate the steering. Administrative insights, official knowledge, policy directions, or citizens’ wishes do not have a self-evident place in this: after all, there is no similar discourse of administrative, policy, or civic steering. Data determines the direction, while administrators and officials sail along and citizens are not even on board, even though they co-own the ship since, after all, it sails on their data.Emiel A. Rijshouwer & Liesbet van Zoonen (2022) - Doing research with a Gamified survey: Reflections from smart city research - Social Science Computer Review, 41 (4), 1363-1380 - doi: 10.1177/08944393211073508 - [link] Marks, L. (1999) The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. An invaluable tour d'horizon of feminist media theory and research, this book will also be essential reading for anyone interested in the many diverse strands of feminist media politics today. Liesbet van Zoonen successfully maps the contours of a now vast terrain, reflecting its tremendous heterogeneity and providing a thoughtful appraisal of current theoretical positions within it' - Margaret Gallagher, Media Consultant Winston, D. (forthcoming) “Religion and the News,” in Cambridge Handbook of American Religious History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2004) “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 345-67.