Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire super--structure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life (Karl Marx, l8th Brumalre of Louis Napoleon, 1852) ... the revolutionary struggle is not fought between capitalism and mind It is fought between capitalism and the proletariat (Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, April 1934).Within the body of work directed at analysing the dominant representations of women, two approaches predominate: content analysis and structuralist semiotics. Both warrant a critical evaluation in terms of (a) their methodologies and (b) their usefulness as instruments of struggle.Content analysis organizes a mass of evidence within pre-determined and preconceived categories, the determinants of which remain largely hidden behind an 'objective-scientific methodology'. It sets out with a set of original hypotheses, such as 'women are represented as less intelligent than men' , and then organizes empirical evidence which serves to confirm the original hypothesis. Thus quality comes to be represented as quantity, as statistics. The ideological function of this shift of levels has been pointed out in a number of works; for instance, Stuart Hall
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