Book: Media, Gender & Identity, David Gauntlett

• The ideas of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' have been pulled through the social changes of the past few decades in quite different ways. Masculinity is seen as the state of 'being a man', which is currently somewhat in flux. 
• Femininity, on the other hand, is not necessarily seen as the state of being a woman'; instead, it's perceived more as a stereotype of a woman's role from the past
• Femininity is not a typical core value today. Instead being 'feminine' is just one of the performances that women can choose to employ in everyday life - perhaps for pleasure, or to achieve a particular goal 
• Although lesbians, gays and bisexuals continue to face prejudice and discrimination, there is a growing amount of evidence that Western societies - especially younger generations - are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity.

Does the mass media have a significant amount of power over it's audience, or does the audience ultimately have more power than the media?

• Theodor Adorno, felt that the power of mass media over the population was enormous and very damaging.
• John Fiske argues that it is the audience not the media, which has the most power. 
• The passivity which media consumption brings to people's lives is Adorno's main concern. In addition there is a belief that the medias's content encourages conformity.
• The concepts of order which (the culture industry) hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo...It proclaims: you shall conform, with no instruction as to what; conform to that exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a result of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideologies such that conformity has replaced consciousness. (1991:90)
• He further argues that the culture industry 'impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves' (1991:92) Critical thinking is closed off by mass produced popular culture. 

• Media effects studies support conservative and right-wing ideologies, even if that is not necessarily the conscious intention of the people producing them. The studies typically suggest that social problems are not rooted in the organisation of society, and inequalities, but are actually the evil magic products of popular culture.
• Violence in News and factual programmes, for example, which is often presented suddenly and without much context, is not seen as a worry, whereas violence in popular drama and movies is of great concern. This again suggests that researchers are more interested in blaming an aspect of popular culture for social problems, than they are in making a coherent and thoughtful argument. 
• In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects in phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (1975:10)
• From children's shows to commercials to prime time adventures and situation comedies, television proclaims that women don't count for much. They are underrepresented in television's fictional life - they are underrepresented in television's fictional life - they are symbolically annihilated. The paucity of women on American television tells viewers that women don't matter much in American society. (1978:10-11)
• Television (in the mid-1980s) is increasingly taking women seriously, and there are a number of programmes, or types of programme, that feature women in a more central way...Women's issues have arrived on the media agenda - documentaries, discussion programmes and dramas on female topics such as infertility. etc. (Dyer, 1987:7)

• Women, in any human form, have almost completely been left out of film...The role of a woman in film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she plays with the male characters. On the other hand a man is not shown purely in relation to the female characters, but in a wide variety of roles. (1972:13)
• Cosmopolitan is aware firstly, that being a women involves constantly adjusting one's own image to fit time and place in an ever-changing game of images; and secondly, that 'real life' is constantly thought through '(dream) images.' 
• Stereotypes in advertising have been similar to those in women's magazines, and other media, although they have often been slower to change with the times. 
• Friedan's 1963 critique of women's magazines runs alongside a similar assessment of advertising; the stereotypes reproduced by the housewife's journals were the same as those exploited by advertisers. 
• The number of 'housewife' images began to decline slowly after the 1950s, but the image was still common in the 1960s and 1970s (Gunter, 1995:34). Content analyses of advertising on television in the early 1970s found strong evidence of stereotyping: of all ads featuring women, three-quarters were for kitchen and bathroom products.

To summarise 

We have seen, unsurprisingly that the mass media used to be very stereotyped in its representations of gender. As well as showing men being more active, decisive, courageous, intelligent and resourceful, television and movies showed a much greater quantity of men, compared to women, as well. There were exceptions of course - its not hard to think of the odd clever, brave or challenging female character from the past - but these remained exceptions to the norm. Magazines and adverts aimed at women also tended to reinforce the feminine and housewife stereotypes. The emergence of Cosmopolitan, though, with its contradictory but generally forthright, assertive and sexually frank approach, heralded the changes which we would see develop in more recent media. 

• In prime time TV shows, 1992-93, men took 61 percent of the total number of speaking roles, with women having the other 39 percent. The 1995-96 study found that men took 63 percent of the speaking roles with women having the other 37 percent. 

Gender in Movies Summary

Representations of gender in movies may have certain predictable trends, but are quite diverse. Any critic or theorist who tries to suggest films are all the same in terms of gender representation is simplifying to the point of meaningless. To summarise some key points; women and men tend to have similar skills and abilities in films today, but if you look at any bunch of films on release and identify the one leading character in each, there's likely to be more men than women. Male characters are also more likely to find themselves able to save a woman in a heroic moment. Leading women have to be attractive, within the recognised conventions for males. Men can get . away with being older, however, and there are far more leading men in their forties, fifties and sixties than there are leading women in this age group. 

• We can also note that whilst magazines for women celebrate the very thin look, magazines for men favour a more curvaceous and not particularly skinny look. Loaded magazine even put it into words: rejecting a female academic's assertion that 'women have the difficulty of living with the male idea of beauty shown on the catwalk.'

Representations of Gender Today Summary

Representations of gender today are more complex, and less stereotyped, than in the past. Women and men are generally equals in the worlds of today's TV and movies, although male characters are still often to the fore. Women are seen as self-reliant heroes quite often today, whilst the depiction of masculinity has become less straightforward, and more troubled. Advertising and the broader world of stars and celebrities, promotes images of well toned and conventionally attractive women and men, which may mean that everyone is under pressure to look good, although women are additionally coerced without make-up, and subjected to even greater paranoia about looking thin. Meanwhile, gay and lesbian characters have started to gain a certain amount of acceptance within the TV mainstream, but remain relatively uncommon in movies. Overall, then , modern media has a more complex view of gender and sexuality than ever before. The images of women and men which it propagates today may be equally valued, but remain different, and diverse. 

The Theory of Structuration 

Gidden's suggests, human agency and social structure are in a relationship with each other, and it is the repetition of the acts of individual agents which reproduces the structure. This means there is a social structure - traditions, institutions, moral codes and established ways of doing things; but it also means that these can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them or reproduce them differently.

Gidden's Late Modernity and Postmodernism 

We are not in a post-modern era, Giddens says. It is a period of late modernity. He does not necessarily disagree with the characterisations of recent social life which other theorists have labelled as postmodern - cultural self consciousness, heightened superficiality, consumerism, scepticism towards theories which aim to explain everything (metanarratives' such as science, religion or marxism) and so on. Giddens doesn't dispute these changes, but he says that we haven't really gone beyond modernity. It has just developed into late modernity. 

Many social expectations remain - although these are perhaps the remnants of the traditions whixh modernity is gradually shrugging off. But in addition, there is capitalism. Here, think not of the dirty factories we associate with Marx's critique, but of fashion and glamour, must-have toys, blockbusting bands and movies, fine foods and nice houses. As Gidden's puts it, 'Modernity opens up the project of the self, but under conditions strongly influenced by the standardising effects of commodity capitalism. (1991:196)

Summary 

With the decline of traditions, identities in general including gender and sexual identities - have become more diverse and malleable. Although sometimes limited by vestiges of tradition, modern lives are less predictable and fixed than they were for previous generations, and identities today are more 'up for grabs' than ever before. Everyone has to choose a way of living - although some people feel more enabled to make more unusual choices than others. The mass media suggests lifestyles, forms of self-presentation and ways to find happiness. To interpret the choices we have made, individuals construct a narrative of the self, which gives some order to our complex lives. This narrative will also be influenced by perspectives which we have adopted from the media. Our relationship with our bodies, our sexual partners and our emotional needs, will all also be influenced by media representations, but in complex ways which will be swayed and modified by our social experiences and interactions. 

Queer Theory & Fluid Identities Summary 

Queer theory is a radical remix of social construction theory, and a call to action: since identities are not fixed - neither to the body nor the 'self' - we can preform 'gender' in whatever way we like. Although certain masculine and feminine formations may have been learned, these patterns can be broken. By spreading a variety of non-traditional images and ideas about how people can appear and act, 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. 

Men's Magazines & Modern Masculinity Summary 

women's magazines, then - like men's magazines, but for different reasons - offer a confusing and contradictory set of ideas. Many of their messages are positive - most readers agreed that the magazines communicated a picture of assertive, independent women - although  the emphasis on looking beautiful, too was generally inescapable. But the readers also agreed that they didn't take all of the magazine's messages seriously anyway - favouring a pick 'n' mix attitude to the various ideas in the magazines - which might suggest that those who fear for the reader-victims of these publications are overemphasising the power of the texts, and under-estimating the ability of readers to be selective and critical. 

On the other hand one could fear that even readers who think that they read magazines very un-seriously are still absorbing lots of messages about what society (as seen through the magazines) thinks is important - such as beauty and sex - and what readers can be less bothered about - such as serious political issues. 

In terms of theories we find that women's magazines like men's suggest ways of thinking about the self, and propose certain kinds of lifestyle, which are then actively processed by the readers as they establish their personal biography, sense of identity, and technologies of the self. The magazines for young women are clearly anti-traditional, emphatically rejecting older models of how women should behave, and encouraging women to embody a certain kind of liberated identity instead. Femininity is exposed as artifice and performance in the magazines, which celebrate women's opportunities to play with different types of imagery, which in line with queer theory's proposition that gender is always a performance. However, although women's magazines encourage a degree of playfulness in terms of clothing and make-up, they would never encourage women to step outside their carefully imagined boundaries of the sexy, stylish and fashionable. 

Criticisms of women's magazines often come from a 'feminist' perspective, but as Angela McRobbie has pointed out, the magazines themselves have incorporated - or at least respond to many feminist ideas. Commenting on publications for teenagers, she wrote:

"The place of feminism inside the magazines remains ambiguous. It has presence mostly in the advice columns and in the overall message to girls to be assertive, confident, and supportive of each other. It is also present in how girls are encouraged to insist on being treated as equals by men and boyfriends, and on being able to say no when they want to. "