Feminist and Gender Media Studies: A Critical Overview

Abstract

This paper offers a general overview of past, current, and developing issues and debates in the growing field of gender and feminist media studies. Its main aim is to provide for those who are new to the field, as well as advanced students and researchers, a broad sense of what is now significant and important area of academic research. It engages with the differences and similarities between gender and feminist media studies, gendered communication systems, gendered news production, feminist methodologies and methods in communication research (textual, audience, and production based), the media's role in constructing gender, and gendered and feminist research by specific media form including advertising, magazines, film, television, news, radio, and the Internet and new media. The outline of research presented is not exhaustive; however, it attempts to trace certain significant developments in the field historically, conceptually, methodologically politically and trans-nationally.1702 Feminist and Gender Media Studies social inequalities across time and cultures, thereby making it difficult for men and women to be equal partners in democratic society. Feminist communication research is tied to a political movement for structural social change rather than individual change. As such, feminist scholarly research is inseparable from activist forms of feminism. On the other hand, gender studies are not implicitly political in the sense of having an agenda for social change on the basis of gender equality. Instead, the principal aim has been one of raising awareness about the ways in which gender affects individual life choices and chances, and thus women's and men's relative personal opportunities for personal and career success. Gender studies in communicationCommunication scholarship examining gender issues has a longer history than that of feminist scholarship. Gender studies usually refer to research which examines the ways in which sex roles -or the false belief that women and men are innately different -are portrayed in the media. Gender studies, as a recognizably distinctive field of academic scholarship, dates back to at least the 1960s in the disciplines of psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology, amongst others. Insights from these disciplines provided a formative basis for the establishment of gender studies in communication primarily from the 1970s onward. Until the 1980s, it was generally assumed that communication studies gender research would focus on women. As the 20th century came to a close, gender and communication scholars became much more interested in also researching some of the ways in which men and male sex roles were portrayed, and began to explore how communication systems and processes contributed to the construction of different forms of masculinity (Benwell 2003;Beynon 2002). This preoccupation represented a shift from assumptions about masculinity as an unquestioned norm, to one in which masculinity became the focus of scholarly examination.As noted above, gender and commun...

Intersections of Gender and National Identity in Sport: A Cultural Sociological Overview

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“…No âmbito dos Estudos Feministas dos Média, as representações de género têm constituído um importante objeto de crítica (Ross, 2010;Silveirinha, 2004a), a par da análise da apropriação dos significados pelas audiências e do papel das/os profissionais dos média na perpetuação das assimetrias sociais (Mendes & Carter, 2008: 1701.…”

“…Na linha do compromisso feminista com a instigação da mudança social (Mendes & Carter, 2008: 1701, o presente estudo visa, justamente, delinear e analisar as representações de género que emergem nas newsmagazines portuguesas, incidindo particularmente na sua interseção com o perfil temático deste tipo de publicações. Em termos metodológicos, o estudo privilegia a análise temática (Braun & Clarke, 2006), na medida em que este método permite explorar os padrões existentes em diferentes tipos de dados.…”

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