Representation and Reality

Hello,

My name is Dr Helen Ring Row and I'm a senior lecturer

in communication studies in Applied Linguistics at the University of Portsmouth.

Today,

I'm going to be talking about the representation

of gender and sexuality in media texts.

To start with,

I'm going to go through some key concepts and background

information that will be relevant and throughout today's talk,

and the first one is the term the media now.

Often we refer to the media as one huge entity.

But in reality, that's a little bit too general or too simplistic,

because actually,

we can subdivide media attacks into lots of different smaller categories

and different genres such as traditional media or social media,

for example.

But even those groupings are probably a little bit too large. And

so when we're talking about the media,

it's just good to remember that there there can be a lot of

variation within that in the examples I'm going to be referring to today,

I'm going to be using examples primarily from Britain and North America,

and these examples will be mostly in English.

Obviously, those are not representative of all media texts,

but we'll give you some kind of flavour of

media discourse from Britain and from North America.

Something else that we need to take into account when looking at

representation of language and sexuality in media tax is the audience.

And again, a bit like the media.

We often refer to the audience as if they were one general overall group.

But in reality and we have audiences plural,

many different people from different backgrounds,

different social groups who might interact with media texts in different ways.

And so we need to think about high audiences.

Plural might respond to different media, text and imagery as well.

The second concept that's important to think about is

the concept of power and how we define power.

In particular, high persuasive language

can be used by different groups, um, to get across or reinforce certain meanings.

Um, par.

We often think of as somebody having complete control of someone

else or one group having complete control of someone else.

That's not often the case, especially media discourse.

It can be quite, it can be a bit more subtle,

and parking relate to media outlets representing certain kinds of narratives

that privilege some groups of people and some messages over others,

and that's really important to bear in mind.

It's not always to do with complete dominance of another group,

but how persuasive media texts can reinforce

messages and reinforce and certain meanings or beliefs

for a range of very complex reasons, such as spatial and time constraints,

perceived newsworthiness,

political views and many more media attacks can never

give us a full or unbiased picture of reality.

Instead,

they use language and imagery to present

certain views and to represent certain ideas

and something that's been a key concern to many media discourse.

Scholars, especially those looking at gender and sexuality,

is around how media attacks represent individuals and certain groups.

Are they represented fairly? Are they represented?

Clearly, are there certain stereotypes that come across in the media texts?

Media communications often reinforce or at the very least,

correspond to societal hierarchies or groupings?

As Rosalind Gill argues, we live in a world that is stratified along lines of gender,

race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, sexuality and location,

and in which the privileges,

disadvantages and exclusions associated with

such categories are unevenly distributed so

that uneven distribution comes across in media language and immediate imagery.

In this course,

will be considering how ideas around gender and sexuality are constructed in

a range of media contacts and exploring and unpacking some stereotypes and

some assumptions that we might find there will also consider how gender

identities and sexual identities might interact

with other categories of identity,

such as social class, race, nationality and so on.

We're going to be looking mainly at contemporary texts and but also looking at

how and some media representations might have

shifted or changed slightly over time.

It's fair to say, in very general terms if we look at mainstream media,

especially in British or North American context,

that we can see an overall shift from, um,

maybe some overtly success media representations to some representations

that seem to be more in keeping with,

um, ca current societal views and societal values.

That's not to say that everything is perfect or there aren't still some

underlying assumptions about gender and sexuality and

that we could unpack and challenge.

But in a broad sense,

there have been shifts over time and towards a

less sexist view in a lot of mainstream media texts