Gender, Ethnicity, Class, And The Media

PREFACE

n this fourth edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media, our overall goal remains the same as in previous editions: to introduce undergraduate students to some of the richness, sophistication, and diversity that characterizes

contemporary media scholarship, in a way that is accessible and builds on students’ own media experiences and interests. We intend to help demystify the nature of mass media entertainment culture and new media by examining their production, analyzing the texts of some of the most pervasive forms or genres, and exploring the processes by which audiences make meaning out of media imagery or texts— meaning that helps shape our economic, cultural, political, and personal worlds.1 We start from the position that, as social beings, we construct our realities out of the cultural norms and values that are dominant in our society. The mass media are among the most important producers and reproducers of such norms and values.

We have designed this as a volume to help teachers (1) introduce the most powerful theoretical concepts in contemporary media studies; (2) explore some of the most influential and interesting forms of contemporary media culture; and (3) focus on issues of gender and sexuality, race, and class from a critical perspective. Most of the readings in this book take an explicitly critical perspective that is also informed by a diversity of approaches, such as political economy, feminism, cultural studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. We have chosen readings that make the following assumptions, as we do: (1) that industrialized societies are stratified along lines of gender and sexuality, race, and class; (2) that everyone living in such a society “has” gender and sexuality, race, and class, and other aspects of social identity that help structure our experience; and (3) that economic and other resources, advantages, and privileges are distributed inequitably in part because of power dynamics involving these categories of experience (as well as others, such as age, ethnicity, ability, or disability). Our selection of material has been guided by our belief that an important goal of a critical education is to enable people to conceptualize social justice clearly and work toward it more effectively. For us, greater social justice would require a fairer distribution of our society’s economic and cultural resources.

Our book is situated within both media studies and cultural studies. When we started working on the first edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media in the early 1990s, cultural studies was a relatively new academic field in the United States, although it had been popular for some time in England (where it originated at The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham). The cultural studies approach has now been dominant in U.S. media studies for

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more than a generation. Several other interdisciplinary fields concerned with social issues and representation, such as American studies and women’s studies, have been heavily influenced by cultural studies.

The field of cultural studies is actually multidisciplinary, drawing on insights and approaches from history, critical race studies, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Because of its progressive politics and because it offers a much broader and apparently more democratic definition of culture than was used in humanistic studies such as literary criticism in the past, many scholars and students particularly interested in race, gender, and class have been attracted to its theories and activist potential. (For a more extended discussion of the development of multiculturalism and cultural studies in the last decades of the 20th century, see Douglas Kellner’s reading in Part I.)

In this fourth edition, we continue to emphasize, with Kellner, three separable but interconnected areas of analysis: political economy, textual analysis, and audience reception. For Kellner, it is crucial to link all three to provide a full understanding of the entire media culture communication process, from production through consumption. Indeed, one of the initial goals of cultural studies was to contextualize the media text within the wider society that informs its production, construction, consumption, and, more recently, distribution along a range of media platforms.

Traditionally, political economy has looked at the ways the profit motive affects how texts are produced within a society marked by class, gender, and racial inequality. Who owns and controls the media? Who makes the decisions about content? How does financing affect and shape the range of texts produced? In what other ways does the profit motive drive production? These are central questions asked by political economists. Examining this economic component is still essential to an understanding of what eventually gets produced and circulated in the mainstream commercial mass media industries. However, with the advent of new media technologies that enable consumers to produce and widely distribute their own content, we must broaden our view of production, as many of the readings in this book do.

Media representations are never just mirrors or “reflections of reality” but, rather, always artfully constructed creations designed to appeal to our emotions and influence our ideas, and especially our consumer behavior. Therefore, to educate ourselves as consumers, we need tools to help us closely examine the ways all cultural texts—from TV sitcoms, dramas, or reality shows to fan-produced music videos—are structured, using complex combinations of words, sounds, and visual languages. Critical textual analysis provides a special focus on how to analyze the ideological significance of media texts—that is, to look at how, through the use of certain codes and conventions, they create or transmit meanings that generally

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support the economic, social, and political status quo.

Media studies has long acknowledged that audiences also have a role in creating the meanings of media texts, and for at least a generation, ethnographic audience reception research has focused on this dimension. By observing and talking with actual consumers of media texts—as opposed to critics—much has been learned about how we are active as we interpret, make sense of, understand, and use such texts within our everyday social and private lives. These studies have played an important role in complicating the older view of media audiences as passive, or even brainwashed, recipients of prepackaged meanings. Clearly, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, political beliefs, and age are important factors that can help explain the different meanings that various audiences appear to take away from an advertisement, movie, or sitcom. Studies of fans—those dedicated consumers of media texts who build community around their experiences of consumption—go even further in exploring how consumers of media texts can produce meanings quite different from those intended by the original text producers. With the advent of new media aided by the Internet, the debate over audience exploitation versus empowerment has only intensified.

However we conceptualize the media audience in the age of the Internet, it is still vital to study all three components of media representations—production, text, and consumption—to understand how such texts can and do strengthen—or perhaps in some ways undermine—our dominant systems and ideologies of gender, race, and class inequality.

In this fourth edition, we have maintained our thematic focus on gender (including sexuality), race, and class, since we believe that media studies need to address the issues of social inequality that continue to plague our society and undermine its democratic potential. Some of the readings in this book employ an intersectional analysis—that is, one that complicates each of these social categories by examining how they interact with one another. Whenever possible, we have selected articles that give voice to the multiple levels of analysis needed to make media studies a truly multicultural endeavor. We acknowledge the ever- intensifying interrelationships among media cultures globally while continuing to focus primarily on the North American examples of media texts that we see as most likely to be familiar to instructors and students working with this book.

For the fourth edition, we again located, read, and discussed many new journal articles and book chapters. We consulted with colleagues who teach media courses, and we spoke to students to see what they found compelling in former editions. Thirty readings in this edition are either new or substantially updated. This reflects both the rapid evolution of the field and our desire to provide analysis of relatively recent and current media texts likely to be familiar to students. Several “classic” readings reprinted from earlier editions of this book were at one time key to highly

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significant developments in the field, and they still offer important and clearly articulated historical and theoretical insights into media analysis.

We’ve grouped our selections into thematic parts that highlight some of the important changes that have taken place in the worlds of entertainment mass media and new media over the past several years and that also reflect our experience of student interest. As in the third edition, we include an index of individual reading topics, which will allow instructors to create alternative groupings of readings to suit their own course designs. We hope that instructors and students will find the themes and genres represented in this collection provocative, stimulating, and an invitation to engage in further thinking, research, and perhaps even media activism.

In condensing previously published journal articles and book chapters, we have often had to omit quite a lot of detail from the originals, while preserving central arguments and challenging ideas. The omissions are carefully noted with the use of ellipses (. . .). By judiciously cutting the overall length, we have aimed to make cutting-edge scholarship as accessible as possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike. Our brief introductory essays to each part highlight key concepts and identify some interesting connections we see among the readings in that section. Of course we welcome comments from users of this book about our selections, about what worked well in the classroom and what did not. We especially invite suggested articles for future editions.

At the end of the book, we have provided some supplementary resources for the teacher. In addition, we have included a selective list of the many media activist organizations easily located on the Internet. We hope this will be useful for those who, inspired by the progressive ideals espoused by many of the writers in this collection, would like to explore this kind of grassroots consumer and citizens’ activism on behalf of a more democratic media culture in the future.

Ancillary Material

Visit www.sagepub.com/dines4e to access online resources including articles from previous editions, video links, web resources, eFlashcards, recommended readings, SAGE journal articles, and more.

Note

1. Throughout our book, key concepts important for students to discuss and digest appear in boldface. These are defined in more detail in the Glossary at the end of the volume. Some instructors have found it useful to assign the Glossary

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http://www.sagepub.com/dines4e
itself as a reading early in a course, for the benefit of students new to media theory and critical cultural studies.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

e would like to thank the many colleagues and students who have contributed over the years to our thinking about the questions raised in this book. They are too many to be mentioned individually, but they include faculty and students at

the University of Massachusetts Boston and Wheelock College, as well as colleagues and associates with whom we have worked in multiple other locations.

Both authors would especially like to thank Susan Owusu, director of the Communications and Media Literacy Program at Wheelock College, for her insights, advice, and help with developing the new edition.

We appreciate all the writers whose essays and edited articles have been included in the four editions, for their original insights and their willingness to allow us to shorten their texts.

We gratefully acknowledge Matt Byrnie, Nancy Loh, Laura Barrett, and Megan Granger at SAGE Publications, for their belief in the book and their careful work in bringing the fourth edition into print.

We are indebted to the external reviewers of all four editions of the book, and most recently to the reviewers of this edition: Jennifer Brayton (Ryerson University), Kenneth Campbell (University of South Carolina), Bobbie Eisenstock (California State University, Northridge), Breanne Fahs (Arizona State University), Ted Gournelos (Rollins College), Heloiza G. Herscovitz (California State University, Long Beach), Kristyn E. Hunt (Lamar University), Cynthia P. King (Furman University), Suzanne Leonard (Simmons College), Heather McIntosh (Boston College), Melinda Messineo (Ball State University), Erin A. Meyers (Oakland University), Margaret Montgomerie (De Montfort University), Amy Kiste Nyberg (Seton Hall University), Robert Rabe (Marshall University), Robin L. Riley (Syracuse University), Tracy M. Robison (Michigan State University), Margaret Schwartz (Fordham University), and Phyllis S. Zrzavy (Franklin Pierce University).

And again, we salute the members of our families, who provided much-needed moral support as we pursued our research and editorial labors.