Media Representation
Hi Everyone!
This week I watched a few videos about representation and I found them very interesting and would like to share my thoughts and what I learned of them.
Why does representation matter? It is a way of people to see themselves, it validates what they look like or who they love. When creating worlds where entire races don't exist, bigger bodies don't exist, sexual orientations don't exist, you're creating a lie that does damage to the viewers. How to not make mistakes of not having groups represented properly in the media in the future is to hire them, put them behind the camera, behind the scenes, to be creators who can tell their own stories.
Representation is one of the cornerstones of media studies and traditionally looks at how the media literally represents reality for example like social groups, events, etc. It's always measured accurately that these representations are against reality. Stuart Hall saw a problem that implies the original subject has a single fixed meaning against which accuracy can be measured but he points out this can't be. Stuart explains that representation isn't an after occurence it's a constitutive one.
Media representations aren't reflections of things that already have meaning they are the meaning makers of things that happen in reality so the next step to consider is who has the ability to make all of this meaning. That person will have a huge amount of power in terms of their ability to influence society. Much of society's understanding of the world is based on meanings which have been created by media producers who are in power as they try to fix a particular meaning to a certain thing in the real world.If you take a closer look at the hegemonic organisations of the world and the people that actually make them up we almost always find is wealthy, white, straight men. The representation that we see in the media tends to reflect their ideology on politics, social issues, etc.
The result Hall says is that "stereotypes are generated because of the limited representations the hegemonic elite show us. The media representations that are shown by these elite media producers. Stuart Hall also came up with reception theory which he points out that the audience can reject these ideas if they don't agree with them but the point is with this theory that the media producers are attempting to fix a meaning to something for the majority of society.
We have this gendered socialization where politics is considered for men, leadership is considered to be a masculine pursuit and women are discouraged from pursuing ambitious positions. If you don't have women there then girls don't see that they can be that, so it's really what you see that inspires your idea of what's possible for you in the world. There are some examples of films and TV shows that portray powerful women but in general the situation in Hollywood is pretty bleak.
Emphasis on women's appearance affects more than just women on screen, it's affecting women's ability to participate in the political process, the more power women gain the stronger the backlash against them and this is most evident in the way the media disrespects our female leaders. When pressed, representations of women who are running for the highest office in the land are focusing for example on how women look instead of what they've done or their issue positions that's got to impact the audience in terms of how they evaluate and judge those women. One of the things that it does is it trivializes them, it makes women seem less powerful.
Women are described emotionally as were men and by painting women as more emotional than men perpetuate the stereotype that women are emotional therefore they're irrational therefore they can't handle a crisis. A woman in power is often seen as a negative thing, we associate all the worst aspects of power and we translate those to a woman seeking to achieve more power.
One of the key ways in which the media played a role in the primary was to talk about Hilary Clinton's ambition as though it were a bad thing. Hilary had people saying to "iron my shirt", she was frequently called bad names in the mainstream media. Sarah Palin presented a very different image. She is the first national high profile female candidate who presented herself in very feminine terms as a "real woman". Hilary tried to be properly masculine and properly feminine and she lost. Sarah puts out this different image of shall we say hyper femininity and she gets beaten up and in really degrading gendered ways.
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