1. GENDER
COMMUNICATION IN
SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS:
MEDIA
Christopher Hawkes
CMS 498
April 29th 2013

2. Table of Contents
1. What is a Institution?
2. Media as a Social Institution
3. Media and Money
4. The Power of Media
5. The Power of Media cont.
6. Interlocking Institutions
7. Media and Gender
8. The Gaze(s)
9. The Gaze(s) cont.
10. The Oppositional Gaze
11. Media Good or Bad?

3. What is a Institution?
 Definition: established patterns of behavior with a
particular and recognized purpose; institutions include
specific participants who share expectations and act in
specific roles, with rights and duties attached to them.

4. Media as a Social Institution
 Based on the definition given, some may find it strange to call
media a institution at all.
 However, looking at media as a whole, and not just a few mediums,
makes it clear that media is a very significant institution.
 “Media is one of the primary mechanism that reiterate gender while
also providing locations in which resistance can occur, in both
construction and reception”(Defransico & Palczewski 2007 p.237).

5. Media and Money
 Money plays the single most important
part in media as we know it today.
 “Media messages are not simply
artifacts created for art‟s sake,
economic processes and institutional
patterns govern them”(Defransico &
Palczewski 2007 p.237).
 Television is a non stop reminder of
this fact. For every show there will be
commercials specifically targeting the
particular audience.
 Now more than ever there seem to be
commercials and ads everywhere you
look, media is all about the money,
and as a audience, its important to
remember that.

6. The Power of Media
 Money and power go hand and hand in America, media
is a vast wealth of resources, so with it comes a very
powerful institution.
 While money is important to power, it‟s the influence of
media that is most powerful.
 Media is constantly influencing social norms like race,
class, nationality and gender.

7. The Power of Media cont.
 A great exmaple of media power as it relates to gender
is the ideal body.
 Female beauty is the most prominent, women you see
on TV and in magazines look “perfect” (traditional
gender/sex expectations). It portrays the idea that this is
what women are supposed to look like. It is very harmful
because no one is perfect, yet it causes women to strive
for it.
 The same goes for men, except the social pressure to
look “perfect” is not as strong as what women face.

8. Interlocking Institutions
 Media is by far the most interlocking of the institutions we
studied.
 The reason being is that media represents and creates norms
for each of them.
 Media influences to the audience what a family, work,
religion, and education are supposed to be like.
 A large portion of shows and movies will represent all three at
the same time, with the typical Christian family, kids go to
college, a wife that stays at home, and a man that is the
breadwinner.

9. Media and Gender
 A study done on media content showed that women are
greatly underrepresented in the media.
 On the Sunday morning news shows only 14% of the
guests were women.
 One the major news stations (ABC,NBC,CBS) women
reported just 25% of the stories in 2004.
 In the entertainment industry 39% of characters were
women, while men accounted for 61%. (Everitt &
Gibbons 2005)
 While equality has made some significant strides, this is
an example of the fact that we still have a long way to
go.

10. The Gaze(s)
 John Berger writes in his book Ways of Seeing (1972) that
“Men act and Women appear….Thus she turns herself into
an object of vision: a sight”(p.47).
 This is significant to possibly understanding media and some
of the problems caused by it.
 “The presumed sex of the viewer is male, and even when the
viewer is female, she views herself though a mans eyes”
(Defransico & Palczewski 2007 p.249).
 It is important to keep in mind that this is a generalization
from Berger, which has flaws, and the book is quick to point
out that he often slips from “discussing media-produced
“ways of seeing” to describing how real men look at real
women in their everyday lives.

11. The Gaze(s) cont.
 Laura Mulvey also published a very popular essay about
the gaze. “Her position was “that cinema not only
highlights woman‟s to-be-looked-at-ness but actually
builds the way a women is to be looked at into the film
itself. ”(Defransico & Palczewski 2007 p.251).
 Brenda Cooper had a much different position on the
topic. She felt that gaze was determined by the viewer.
She also felt that multiple gazes exist, and “rejection of
the dominant male gaze can be found in mainstream
Hollywood films” (Defransico & Palczewski 2007 p.250).

12. The Oppositional Gaze
 After looking at all the different scholars view on gaze,
Bell Hook offers the Oppositional gaze.
 The idea is that as long as you understand gaze, and
how the media uses it, the gaze is what you make it.
 “Media „s positioning of the audience is not
determinative as long as audiences are conscious of
media‟s attempt to position them. Audience members
can reposition themselves” (Defransico & Palczewski
2007 p.251).

13. Media: Good or Bad?
 The media is a never ending cycle of performance of gender,
as well as many other things.
 Media is a great source of entertainment and pleasure for
many people.
 For most of us it‟s a part of our everyday lives regardless of
whether we want it to be or not.
 The most important factor of media as it relates to gender is
to always think critically, and employ the oppositional gaze.
 Using these practices wont solve the gender based issues
with media, but it will keep you from being a passive recipient
of media, and make you an “active participant in culture”.

14. Work Cited
 DeFrancisco, Victoria L., and Catherine Helen.
Palczewski. "Media." Communicating Gender
Diversity: A Critical Approach. Los Angeles:
Sage Publications, 2007. N. pag. Print.
 "Google Images." Google Images. N.p., n.d.
Web. 29 Apr. 2013.