Media Representation

There are six theorists associated with Media Representation

o David Gauntlett
o Liesbet Van Zoonen
o Judith Butler
o bell hooks
o Stuart Hall
o Paul Gilroy

You will need to able to apply their theories when you analyse examples.
 Gauntlett – Identity theory
“Identity is complicated; everyone’s got one.” Gauntlett believes that while everyone is an individual, people tend
to exist within larger groups who are similar to them. The media do not create identities, but reflect them.

Individuals make choices about their identity and lifestyle. Even in the traditional media, there are many diverse and
contradictory messages that people use to think through their identities and how they express themselves. For
example, the success of ‘popular feminism’ and increasing representation of different sexualities created a world
where the meaning of gender, sexuality and identity is increasingly open. Nike: Dream Crazier

Gauntlett (2015):

• “We should look at media not as channels for communicating messages, and not as things.”
• “We should look at media as triggers for experiences and for making things happen.”
• “They can be places of conversation, exchange, and transformation.”
• “Media in the world means a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks – some igniting new
meanings, ideas, and passions, and some just fading away”.

People still build identities, through everyday, creative practice. However, this practice would be improved by better
platforms for creativity.
 Van Zoonen – Feminism and Patriarchy
In patriarchal (rule of men) culture, the way women’s bodies are represented as
objects is different to the representation of male bodies as spectacle.

Gender is performative – our ideas of femininity and masculinity are constructed

in our performances of these roles. Gender is ‘what we do’ rather than ‘what we
are’. Moreover, gender is contextual – its meaning changes with cultural and
historical contexts.

Van Zoonen disagrees with arguments that the internet, being based on
collaboration, is a technology that is true and close to women and femininity.
These views are too simple and based on the idea of an essential femininity,
whereas there is a rich diversity of ways that gender is articulated on the internet.
Van Zoonen believes the media
portray images of stereotypical
women and this behaviour reinforces
society’s views.

The media does this because they

believe it reflects dominant social
values (what people believe in) and
male producers are influenced by this.

This is a patriarchy (a society ran by

men for men) which dominates and
oppresses women.
 bell hooks – Feminist theory

bell hooks (lower case) believes that wealthy, white, male people control the media
industries and their values and beliefs are the ones that we see in the vast majority
of media products.

People who are not wealthy, white and male will not see their values in media
products and whole groups of people (and their values) are misrepresented or
ignored. This create prejudice towards these groups.

hooks believes that black women are seen as the lowest status in media texts
because of their ethnicity and gender.
Lord Rothermere (owner Daily Mail)

Lord Tony Hall (Director General BBC)

Rupert Murdoch (owner the Times, The Sun, Sky TV) Katharine Viner (editor The Guardian)
 Butler – Gender performative theory

Gender is a performance; it’s what you do at particular times,

rather than a universal who you are.

https://youtu.be/Bo7o2LYATDc
Hall – Representation theory

Representation theory says there is no true

representation of people or events in a text, but
instead are lots of ways these can be represented.

Producers try to fix (or anchor) a meaning for

people or events.
Mail Online Ladies Day coverage:
Royal Ascot

Mail Online Ladies Day coverage:

Aintree Racecourse (Liverpool)
 Paul Gilroy – ethnicity and Post Colonial theory

The African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a
transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and
British – the ‘Black Atlantic’.

Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating ‘postcolonial melancholia’,
an attachment to an airbrushed version of British colonial history, which
expresses itself in criminalising immigrants and an ‘us and them’ approach to the
world founded on the belief in the inherent superiority of white western
civilisation.

Armstrong and Miller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL1zs4OKYAU

“The political conflicts that characterize multicultural societies can take on a very
different aspect if they are understood to exist firmly in a context supplied by imperial
and colonial history”
“Though that history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in
the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of unlikely connections
and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and colonial past continues to shape
political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-longer-imperial countries.” (Gilroy, 2004).

Gilroy connects domestic conceptions of race, racism, immigrants, and national identity
to its imperial reach, affecting both newcomer and native-born. Gilroy calls for attention
to the 20th century “histories of sufferings” in order to “furnish the resources for
the peaceful accommodation of otherness in relation to fundamental commonality.”
Such attentions result in part from Gilroy’s concerns over the failure of Britain to
highlight or even explain their post colonial conflicts. The near-worship of Second World
War era Britain obscures these realities and fails to account for the changes that have
developed socially and politically.