Gender and the Media: Women’s Places

This introduction locates the 11 chapters of the volume under three headings: Agency-Affirming Places, Overtly Hostile or Agency-Denying Places, and Covertly Negating Places. Each chapter is summarized briefly, detailing its methods and key findings. Following the summaries, the editors point to common themes among the chapters and discuss the relationship between media and physical and symbolic gender-based violence as illustrated in the chapters. keywords: Media; violence; rap; cyberbullying; comics; sex trafficking Mass media communication is a hallmark of the early twenty-first century. We are continually and repeatedly bombarded by messages through social media and cable tv as well as other forms of mass communication. the power of media to affect our thoughts and behavior is particularly evidenced by research on advertising. advertising, a commodification of influence (Wu, 2016), involves the overt selling of a product, but also a covert cultural indoctrination. Woman’s second place as depicted in family scenarios, by the feminine touch and the license to withdraw from the main activity portrayed as well as the ritualization of woman’s subordination is a major form of this indoctrination (Goffman, 1979). Jean Kilbourne (Jhally & Kilbourne, 2010) who began her series of films Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women in 1979 observes that the media’s image of women has worsened over time: stereotypes and misogynist messages have Gender and the Media: Women’s Places advances in Gender research, Volume 26, 1–12 copyright © 2019 by emerald Publishing limited all rights of reproduction in any form reserved issn: 1529-2126/doi:10.1108/s1529-212620180000026002 2 vasiLiKie deMos and Marcia teXLer seGaL increased with a cult of thinness continuing to exercise a dangerous control over girls and women. Woman’s second place as socially or physically defined is a major theme of this volume, one around which chapters are organized. there are three parts to the volume according to place: agency-affirming Places, overtly hostile or agency-denying Places, and covertly negating Places. We placed a chapter into a particular part according to its emphasis; however, many of the themes and key concepts run through all or most of the chapters. this introduction consists of two parts: in this first part, we provide a summary of the overall book in terms of the major theme: women’s places, and in the second we discuss other themes that tie the chapters together. three tyPes of Places Agency-Affirming Places Places that are affirming energize women and motivate them to use their initiative. sometimes, they are places from which women can “talk back” or express anger over sexism they’ve experienced. the four chapters in Part i involve agencyaffirming places. in “War, culture, and agency among sahrawi Women refugees: a Photo-essay,” amira Karaoud has assembled photographs she took during the time she spent living and participating in the sahrawi refugee community in southwest algeria created at the beginning of the Western sahara War in 1976. Karaoud explains that sahrawi women are hassani, an indigenous nomadic people in which women assume the leadership positions in the family while the men herd camels and goats. informed by her ethnographic work, her background as an arab woman, and her consequent rapport with the women, Karaoud used her camera to counter Western colonial views of arab/Muslim women as passive and oppressed or sensual and seductive. her images depict women in various leadership capacities including as teachers and political organizers as well as in various nurturing roles as mothers or as in one particularly appealing image candy courier to the camp’s children. Karaoud clearly shows the sahrawi refugee community as an affirming place for women. in “From ‘old Boy’ to “Gender Progressive’: the shifting Gender story of Funeral Work in trade Journal Publications,” sarah B. donley takes advantage of the availability of funeral industry trade publications at a community college with a mortuary science school to perform an ethnographic content analysis demonstrating a shift in the way women are discussed in the publications from 1995 to 2013, a period in which a marked shift in gender composition of members of the profession occurred. Placing her data in the context of research on feminizing occupations and of the depiction and gender-typing of women in the media more generally, she identifies four gender narratives: old boy, gender essential, gender blind, and gender progressive. her chapter offers a view of an occupation that has not been extensively studied by sociologists, demonstrates the value of trade publications as data sources, and offers insight into how one profession responded to shifting educational and occupational trends. it adds to the literature on gender Women’s Places: An Introduction to Gender and the Media 3 segregation in occupations and shifts in their gender compositions. her chapter fits into the section on agency-affirming places in that donley reveals the funeral industry as a workplace once hostile to women, now more woman-friendly and moving toward a gender-neutral environment. “Punk Fairytale: Popular Music, Media, and the (re)Production of Gender” is one of three chapters that discuss gender in the context of audience response to music as a medium and music as a subject of other media. in this one, authors Paula Guerra, Luiza Bittencourt, and Gabriela Gelain place the development and contents of feminist punk fanzines in the context of twentieth century Portuguese history, the development and response to the punk movement, popular culture scholarship, the music industry, and even Portuguese grammar. Feminist voices were deliberately silenced by the fascists who controlled the country from 1926 to 1974 and neglected in favor of other priorities by the anti-fascists. in the 1970s the punk movement, at least in Portugal, arose as a protest movement of both working and middle-class youth, including those in the visual and creative arts, expressing an embrace of modernity. the role of women in the Portuguese punk movement is difficult to assess in part because of male-dominated scholarship and criticism. another factor is that having less freedom and fewer resources than their male counterparts in the early years, some girls and young women found their voices in alternative places such as the teenybopper subculture which was regarded as less creative. additionally, when women did start their own bands they were treated as novelties rather than regarded as a part of the subculture. Finally, women’s participation was less-well documented because they were not part of the production process. the development of ideological fanzines, links to some of whose covers and contents are included in the chapter, provided a vehicle for women’s voices. Produced and controlled by women and directed toward a female audience, fanzines allowed their readers to use innovative language and graphics and to explore concepts of femininity, identity, sexuality, and sexual orientation. the authors show how the fanzines connected multiple struggles that impacted women, for example, by pointing to the inherent sexism in Western medicine and adopting an ecofeminist stance toward the environment. in the male-dominated punk Portuguese music scene, feminist women who are part of the scene have been able to express themselves in fanzines, thus having created for themselves an agencyaffirming place, a place where they can talk back to society. teaching the hip-hop curriculum allowed andrea n. hunt to see its value as “a part of reaching diversity goals in higher education and ... facilitating cross-racial interactions” (p. 65). in her chapter, “‘trappin’ ain’t shit to Me’: how undergraduate students construct Meaning around race, Gender, and sexuality within hip-hop,” she reports the results of interviews with a diverse group of college students paying particular attention to the impact of hip-hop on their racial/ethnic and gender identities and their perceptions of the ways in which women and men are portrayed in the lyrics and videos. Black students saw hip-hop as shaping others’ expectations of them and, particularly for those who grew up in predominantly White communities, as a means of establishing their racial identities. White students who appreciated the music 4 vasiLiKie deMos and Marcia teXLer seGaL expressed concerns about cultural appropriation. Black men presented nuanced and conflicted analyses fearing that the material expressing the experiences of the artists could be misinterpreted, especially by younger listeners, as a way to be cool. Women’s appreciation of women artists and the way women are portrayed was complex. Like the men they saw women in the videos as sex objects or toys but acknowledged that hip-hop portrayals gave women the freedom to choose sexualized behavior and attire and sometimes acknowledged that desirable women came in a wide range of body types. african american women were particularly critical of colorism in lyrics and of the stereotype of the angry Black woman. none of the interviewees thought that positive relationships were illustrated in hip-hop. some did see the genre as raising consciousness about social issues and containing positive messages about struggle. thus, in interviewing students, hunt provides them a place to critically reflect on and express their reactions to hip-hop lyrics, to talk back; interrupting what otherwise may have been a one-way mass communication, she helps the reader better understand how lyrics that may be considered demeaning to women can be interpreted as liberating. Overtly Hostile or Agency-Denying Places overtly hostile places or agency-denying places are those contexts and spaces that cause women to fear for their physical and psychological health and those that deny women the right to freely express themselves. in her study of the depiction o