Feminist Media Criticism and Feminist Media Practices

Abstract

This article explores four thematic areas in feminist media criticism. First, it considers how gender informs norms and values that pattern industry production practices and conventions. Next, it explores how feminist criticism has influenced one of the emergent areas in media scholarship: reception studies. This particular subgenre of media studies examines how audiences actively engage the mediascape around them. Third, the focus shifts to the rising influence of black feminist criticism, which has identified many of the tensions within feminism and also has pointed toward new modes of media criticism and practice. Fourth, the article examines how feminism has informed the study of masculinity. The final section of the article identifies and briefly discusses two areas that will forge new directions in feminist media studies: the burgeoning sex industry and globalization.

Fallen Women and Rescued Girls: Social Stigma and Media Narratives of the Sex Industry in Victoria, B.C., from 1980 to 2005

“…Academic understandings of the role of media in the production/reproduction of dominant knowledges have been influenced by the work of Stuart Hall, among other cultural theorists (Barak, 1994;Hall, 1978;Kitzinger, 2000;Pateman, 1988;Sacks, 1996;Seale, 2003;Watkins and Emerson, 2000). Cultural studies approaches to media are distinguished by an attention to power as a player in the transmission of social knowledge and in the reception of values and meanings.…”

“…This means that analyses of media should include interrogation of the structural relations in which media practices are embedded. A sizeable literature has fleshed out the various ways in which media narratives nourish gender stereotypes and normative orders of gender inequality by, for example, selective omission of issues that are more salient to women and the punctuation of issues that involve male newsmakers and authority figures (Watkins and Emerson, 2000). This literature underscores the more general claim that mainstream media practices are structurally embedded within hegemonic moral, economic and political orders, that media news, information and entertainment are told from particular social locations, and that these locations correspond with positions of moral, economic and political power (Sacks, 1996;Watkins and Emerson, 2000).…”

Organizing bell hooks’ Frameworks for Interrogating Representations

“…In the beginning of the 1960s, feminist critics began scrutinizing popular media. Modern feminists critics, in particular, sought to establish strategies, frameworks, and models to understand, read, and analyze the role of media in propagating sex and gender inequalities by looking at specific representations and misrepresentations of women (Watkins & Emerson, 2000). Whether these cultural productions were accurate ways of seeing women or unrealistic meanings and messages presented by mass media, critics were concerned about how girls and women internalize and apply them in their actual lives (Genz & Brabon, 2009).…”

Does The Law Matter? A Comparative News Media Analysis Of Representations Of Sex Work Across Three Jurisdictions

“…It can be noted that the members of those populations rarely provide news discourse about marginalised populations and that the dissemination of meaning is generally tilted in favour of those who already have the social, economic and moral privilege (Benoit et al, 2008, p. 122). So, while readers are noted across media effects literature as active agents in the interpretive process (Hall, 1997;Kitzinger, 2000;Seale, 2003;Watkins & Emerson, 2000), it is noted that common sense meanings flow more productively from the top down. In regards to meaning produced by news media, Kitzinger's study (2000) refers to 'templates' which iteratively construct and link news events and characters to produce normative ideas about people and things, concluding that social policy and the media are crucially tied together (p. 81).…”

“…The significance of the voices that emerged speaks to the idea that the provision of space for sex worker's voices may work to enhance safety and quality of life and allow these women to inhabit empowered spaces outside of the margins (Hallgrimsdottir et al;2005Watkins & Emerson, 2000. It is pertinent to note that the social distance from the audience to a sex worker is supported by mainstream news media when the reporting focuses on victim stories, the scintillating aspects of the industry, and reproduces cultural scripts which reinforce the madonna/whore notion.…”