Teaching Media and Gender

Abstract

The field of Communication Studies has traditionally dismissed the gender question as trivial, or incorporated it through a view of the 'sexless audience.' The integration of feminist questions remains for many a non-issue in media studies. Unfortunately, this is true for both the more traditional sectors of our scholastic community and for those committed to teaching communication within a critical perspective. It is interesting, for example, that a recent issue of Media, Culture and Society, devoted to the subject "Critical Comunications Research in North America," does not include one piece on the gender issue and its place within a critical perspective. The special issue of the Journal of Communication entitled, "Ferment In The Field," was comprised of thirty-five original essays which the editors argued were 'representative1 of the 'critical issues' and 'research tasks' facing our discipline today. Again, the gender issues does not appear on the agenda. If the question of social and economic power is central to any critical perspective, and I would argue that it is, then the failure of such work to come to terms with sex-based power differentials and their role in cultural production and reproduction is sympotmatic of serious flaws in our theoretical traditions.My intention in this article is not, however, to demonstrate how the gender issue can and should be made a key element of mainstream communication curriculum although I consider this task a crucial step in the development of a critical tradition in communication theory. Rather, I intend to demonstrate how a critical perspective can inform the construction of a course in media studies centered around the gender i ssue . CRITICAL TEACHINGA beginning point in this exercise is to clarify one's objective in teaching a critical perspective. What can one hope to contribute in providing a critical frame of reference to the students? Perhaps the best we can do is to enable them to make sense of their own experience. In the words of C. W. Mills:What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves ( 1959, 5).These words have particular significance when applied to the subject of media and gender. Most students, and indeed most consumers of popular culture, have a loosely-defined understanding of 'sexism' in the media. When asked to articulate that understanding, the common response runs the gamut from "busty blondes in skimpy outfits who are always rescued by handsome male heroes" to "fat women with their heads in their ovens"! Underlying assumptions about the sources of media sexism, the mechanisms by which it is re-created and transmitted, the cultural context in which gender is constructed or even the contradictory levels of meaning regarding femininity, are seldom questioned. Therefore one of the major tasks in a course of this type is to teach students h w to ask thes...

Editorial

“…Another thread that weaves through the current batch of articles from start to finish affirms the critical and creative dimensions of communication scholarship discussed with cogency by Eileen Saunders (in 1985). To suggest that something is "on the line" reminds us that when our research engages with relevant subjects, then something is at stake, that our research matters.…”