Representation of gender. Textual analysis and representation

1. GENDER
TEXTUALANALYSIS AND REPRESENTATION

2. Why is understanding Representation Important?
Ideologies
• Cultural beliefs or ways of looking at things.
• Often thought of as common sense.
• Things we believe are true but aren’t necessarily true.
• Media creates and nurtures these ideas creating
possible false truths for us to identify with.

3. Textual Analysis
• Literally means analysing texts - in our case the text will be a
five minute clip from a television drama.
• Denotation and Connotation.
• What lies beneath the text. What ideologies are being created
or reinforced?
• How are ‘they’ portraying the world and different social
groups?

4. Gender
The representation of men and women.
Gender is perhaps the basic category we use
for sorting human beings, and it is a key issue
when discussing representation. Essential
elements of our own identity, and the
identities we assume other people to have,
come from concepts of gender - what does it
mean to be a boy or a girl? Many objects, not
just humans, are represented by the media as
being particularly masculine or feminine -
particularly in advertising - and we grow up
with an awareness of what constitutes
'appropriate' characteristics for each gender.

5. Representation of Women
Feminism has been around for over 40 years yet
media representations of women are worryingly the
same.
Representations of women across all media tend to
highlight the following:
• beauty (within narrow conventions)
• size/physique (again, within narrow conventions)
• sexuality (as expressed by the above)
• emotional (as opposed to intellectual) dealings
• relationships (as opposed to independence/
freedom)

6. Representation of Women
• Women are often represented as being part of a context
(family, friends, colleagues) and working/thinking as part of a
team. In drama, they tend to take the role of helper (Propp) or
object, passive rather than active.
• Often their passivity extends to victimhood. Men are still
represented as TV drama characters up to 3 times more
frequently than women, and tend to be the predominant focus
of news stories.

7. Representation of Women
• The representations of women that do make it onto
page and screen do tend to be stereotypical, in terms
of conforming to societal expectations, and characters
who do not fit into the mould tend to be seen as
dangerous and deviant.

8. Representation of Women
• Discussions of women's representation in the media tend to
revolve around the focus on physical beauty to the near-
exclusion of other values, the lack of powerful female role
models, and the extremely artificial nature of such portrayals,
which bear little or no relation to the reality experience by
women across the planet.

9. Representation of Women
• Laura Mulvey’s “Male Gaze” theory. Remind yourself
of her theory here. Summarise in your own words the
extent to which her theory is still relevant in the media
today.

10. Representation of Men
'Masculinity' is a concept that is
made up of more rigid stereotypes
than femininity. Representations of
men across all media tend to focus
on the following:
• Strength - physical and
intellectual
• Power
• Sexual attractiveness (which may
be based on the above)
• Physique
• Independence (of thought,
action)

11. Representation of Men
• Male characters are often represented as isolated, as not
needing to rely on others (the lone hero). If they submit to
being part of a family, it is often part of the resolution of a
narrative, rather than an integral factor in the initial balance.
• It is interesting to note that the male physique is becoming
more important a part of representations of masculinity.
Compare Sean Connery as James Bond in Thunderball from
1965, with Daniel Craig as the same character in Casino Royale
from 2006.

12. Representation of Men

13. Representation of Men

14. Representation of Men
• Increasingly, men are finding it as difficult to live up to their
media representations as women are to theirs. This is partly
because of the increased media focus on masculinity - think of
the growing market in men's magazines, both lifestyle and
health - and the increasing emphasis on even ordinary white
collar male workers (who used to sport their beer-gut with
pride) having the muscle definition of a professional swimmer.
Anorexia in teenage males has increased alarmingly in recent
years, and recent high school shootings have been the result
of extreme body consciousness among the same demographic
group.

15. Representation of Men
• As media representations of masculinity become more
specifically targeted at audiences with product promotion in
mind (think of the huge profits now made from male fashion,
male skin & hair care products, fitness products such as
weights, clothing etc), men are encouraged (just as women
have been for many years) to aspire to be like (to look/behave
in the same way) the role models they see in magazines. This
is often an unrealistic target to set, and awareness of this is
growing.