Introduction
Media and Communications are a central element to modern life.
Gender and sexuality remain at the core of how we think about our identities.
It's unlikely that the media has a direct and straightforward effect on its audiences.
It's unsatisfactory to assume that people copy or borrow their identities from the media.
This book sets out to establish what messages the media sends to contemporary audiences about gender.
Anthony Giddens, Michael Foucault, Judith Butler.
worldopinion.com and www.statstics.gov.uk (to view statistics on leisure activities and media consumption).
Establishing the the relative positions of women and men in the modern western democracies
The sexes today are generally thought to be equal.
Equality within everyday life is still quite established.
'Modern Men's crisis'.
Mass media help men and women adapt to contemporary life.
Men don't need to become like women, but can have a greater value on love, family and personal relationships. - Anthony Clare
Both sexes have now become victims of the culture of consumerism, appearances and glamour.
Some parts of popular culture seem to be reasserting the traditional forms of masculinity whilst others seem to be challenging them.
Schoolgirls today are outperforming at all levels of school education. Cassidy 2001.
Sales of the barbie doll are falling because only the youngest girls will accept such a 'girly' toy nowadays. (Moorhead, 2001).
Young people are more sympathetic towards gay liberties.
Biological Determination - the view that people's behaviour patterns are the result of their genes and inheritance. They argue that women and men are fundamentally different , they were born that way.
Social Constructionism - people's personality and behaviour are not pre-determine by biology, but are shaped by society and culture. People can adapt and change.
How do mass produced items become significant in how we think of ourselves.
www.theory head.com/gender
Media Power VS People Power
Theodor Adorno - Power of mass media over the population was enormous and damaging.
John Fiske - The audience, not the media, has the most power.
Conformity has replaced consciousness.
Media is an enabler of ideas and meanings.
Media Effects and Development of Gender Identity
Influences upon any decision to do something are a complex combination of previous experiences, opinions, values and suggestions.
The effects model on children -
Positions children as potential victims of the mass media.
Allow young people no opportunity to express their critical abilities, intelligence or free will.
Children can talk intelligently and cynically about the mass media. (Buckingham, 1993, 1996)
Children as young as 7 can make thoughtful, critical and media literate videos themselves.
Children's behaviour in experiments changes in accordance to what they think the adult wants to see.
Psychology
Some psychologists believe that chromosomal and hormonal differences are the main causes of differences between male and female behaviour.
Others say that gender roles are learned during development and everyday life.
'Nature vs Nurture debate'.
Strange when modern day scientists try to 'prove' that sex differences are important.
Social learning theory, modelling and reinforcement, not much to it though.
Cognitive development theory, gender roles are learned, however the child is more active in the creation of their own gender identity.
A child will acquire a 'gender constancy', they will then develop their personality with an either masculine or feminine mould. The child then actively seeks about how to act like a boy or girl. Children initially learn that certain activities or interests are appropriate for one sex or the other. They then learn and interpret the world through these ideas.
^deterministic and descriptive
These make it sound as if this is a natural and necessary part of a child's development, that they have to cultivate a masculine or feminine identity.
Could create ideas of failed to require a gender constancy, or have a incomplete gender schema. Gender Identity disorder.
Freud - The developing child will identify with their same sex parent.
History
The mass media used to be very stereotyped in it's representations of gender. Women's advertisements tended to reinforce stereotypes of the feminine and housewifely stereotypes. Whereas showing men being more active, decisive, courageous, intelligent and resourceful. Cosmopolitan heralded the changes which we would see to develop in more recent media.
Recent Media
Friends had a fresh outlook on men and women. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hugely popular with the typically male-dominated world of sci-fi fans. Confident and assertive. A role model for everyone, has to use her wits and physical strength, yet still has to get high marks in school.
Charlie's Angels, boys were not keen on it however girls loved it.
What Women Want.
That's why mum's go to Iceland. - It is acceptable to show women as housewives after all.
Today's advertising does not want to alienate any target audience, so does not often include stereotypes, other than as a joke or to be laughed at.
Advertising is now more about looking nice, and perfect families.
Giddens - Self Identity
There is a social structure however, these can be changed when people start to ignore them, change and replace them.
People's everyday actions and other people's expectations are what make up the social forces and social structures.
People have a 'faith' in the coherence of everyday life. Challenges their everyday understanding of how things should be in the world.
The performance of gender is something that is learned and policed and something that is constantly worked on and monitored.
Social changes brought about by changes about how people view life.
Capitalism - fashion, glamour, must have toys, bands, movies, food and houses.
The stuff we buy to express ourselves has an impact on our self identity.
People are in control of their own lives.
Giddens - his model of social life excludes emotions and sentiment.
Michael Foucault
Individuals own dynamic adaptation to their surroundings. People's subjective responses.
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Technologies of the self, practice of our ethics, our set of standards to do with being a particular sort of person.
Strategies for making sense of modern life.
The particular ways of talking about things shape the way that we perceive the world and our own selves.
Power is productive because it causes things to happen.
Queer Theory
Nothing within your identity is fixed.
Your identity is a pile of things of which you have previously expressed or which have been said about you.
Gender is a performance, therefore people can change.
The divide between masculinity and femininity is a social construction built on the divide between men and women which is also a social construction.
We should challenge the traditional views of masculinity and femininity by causing 'gender trouble'.
There is no singular notion of identity.
Feminism causes the notion that women are a unique species.
Butler, You have a body, you may perform an identity, you may have desires.
If people were not always divided this way then it is not a universally fixed term.
Gender has been culturally constructed.
Gender is seen as an attribute, which then becomes a fixed permanent form of that persons' self.
Gender should be seen as a fluid variable which can shift and change in different contexts at different times.
How you behave is all that your gender is.
Gender and sexuality can therefore be reinvented in the here and now.
Sex and gender were just social constructs that we could 'wish away'.
We can 'perform' gender in whatever way we like.
Although certain masculine and feminine formations may have been learned, these patterns can be broken.
The mass media can serve a valuable role in shattering the unhelpful moulds of 'male' and 'female' roles which continue to apply constraints upon people's ability to be expressive and emotionally literate beings.
Modern Male Identities
Men's magazines are seen as reflecting to find positions for the ideas of women and men in a world in a world where the sexes are more similar than different.
Old fashioned masculine values or a back-lash against feminism.
Shows men insecurely trying to find their place in the modern world.
Offers some reassurance, enabling a more confident narrative of the self.
The magazines also raise anxieties. Be both enabling and constraining.
Some fluidities of identities is invited.
Conceals the nervousness of boys who might prefer life to be simpler, but are doing their best to face up to modern realities anyway.
Modern Female Identities
Nowadays women magazines objectify men using the same kind of language and imagery as men's magazines.
Offer a confusing and contradictory set of ideas.
Many messages are positive. Assertive and independent women.
Didn't take all the messages seriously anyway.
Actively processed by the reader s they establish their personal biography, sense of identities and technologies of self.
Younger women's magazines encouraging a 'liberated' identity instead.
Celebrate women's opportunities to play with different types of imagery which is in line with the idea that gender is a performance.
They would never encourage women to step outside their carefully imagined boundaries of the sexy, the stylish and the fashionable.
Role Models
They feed into our calculations about how we view life and where we would like to fit into society.
Generational Differences
Anti-traditional attitudes established in the young will be carried into later life.
Conservative attitudes develop throughout the population as we get older.
Mass media has become more liberal and more challenging to traditional standards and this has been a reflection of changing attitude, but also involves the media actively spreads modern values.
Whether the post-traditional young women and men of today will grow up to be the narrow-minded traditionalists of the future.
Conclusion
We no longer get singular, straightforward messages about the ideal types of male and female identities.
This opens the possibilities of gender trouble.
Nothing about identity is clear-cut.
The contradictory messages of popular culture make the 'ideal' model for the self even more indistinct, which is probably a good thing.
Things do change.
Popular media has a significant but not entirely straightforward relationship with people's sense of gender and identity.
Media messages are diverse, diffuse and contradictory.
The meanings of gender, sexuality and identity are increasingly open.
Modern life is all about radical uncertainties and exciting contradictions.
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