Media Representation

There are six theorists associated with Media Representation

o David Gauntlett
o Liesbet Van Zoonen
o Judith Butler
o bell hooks
o Stuart Hall
o Paul Gilroy

You will need to able to apply their theories when you analyse example
 Gauntlett – Identity theory
“Identity is complicated; everyone’s got one.” Gauntlett believes that while everyone is an individual,
people tend to exist within larger groups who are similar to them. The media do not create identities,
but reflect them.
Individuals make choices about their identity and lifestyle. Even in the traditional media, there are many
diverse and contradictory messages that people use to think through their identities and how they express
themselves. For example, the success of ‘popular feminism’ and increasing representation of different
sexualities created a world where the meaning of gender, sexuality and identity is increasingly open. Nike:
Dream Crazier

Gauntlett (2015):

• “We should look at media not as channels for communicating messages, and not as things.”
• “We should look at media as triggers for experiences and for making things happen.”
• “They can be places of conversation, exchange, and transformation.”
• “Media in the world means a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks – some
igniting new meanings, ideas, and passions, and some just fading away”.

People still build identities, through everyday, creative practice. However, this practice would be improved
by better platforms for creativity.
 Van Zoonen – Feminism and Patriarchy
In patriarchal (rule of men) culture, the way women’s bodies are
represented as objects is different to the representation of male bodies
as spectacle.

Gender is performative – our ideas of femininity and masculinity are

constructed in our performances of these roles. Gender is ‘what we do’
rather than ‘what we are’. Moreover, gender is contextual – its meaning
changes with cultural and historical contexts.

Van Zoonen disagrees with arguments that the internet, being based on
collaboration, is a technology that is true and close to women and
femininity. These views are too simple and based on the idea of an
essential femininity, whereas there is a rich diversity of ways that gender
is articulated on the internet.
Van Zoonen believes the media
portray images of stereotypical
women and this behaviour
reinforces society’s views.

The media does this because they

believe it reflects dominant
social values (what people
believe in) and male producers
are influenced by this.

This is a patriarchy (a society ran

by men for men) which dominates
and oppresses women.
 bell hooks – Feminist theory

bell hooks (lower case) believes that wealthy, white, male people control
the media industries and their values and beliefs are the ones that we see in
the vast majority of media products.

People who are not wealthy, white and male will not see their values in
media products and whole groups of people (and their values) are
misrepresented or ignored. This create prejudice towards these groups.

hooks believes that black women are seen as the lowest status in media
texts because of their ethnicity and gender.
Lord Rothermere (owner Daily Mail)

Lord Tony Hall (Director General BBC)

Rupert Murdoch (owner the Times, The Sun, Sky TV)Katharine Viner (editor The Guardian)
 Butler – Gender performative theory

Gender is a performance; it’s what you do at particular

times, rather than a universal who you are.

https://youtu.be/Bo7o2LYATDc
Hall – Representation theory

Representation theory says there is no true

representation of people or events in a text,
but instead are lots of ways these can be
represented.

Producers try to fix (or anchor) a meaning for

people or events.
Mail Online Ladies Day coverage:
Royal Ascot

Mail Online Ladies Day

coverage: Aintree Racecourse
(Liverpool)
 Paul Gilroy – ethnicity and Post Colonial theory

The African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a
transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean
and British – the ‘Black Atlantic’.

Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating ‘postcolonial

melancholia’, an attachment to an airbrushed version of British colonial
history, which expresses itself in criminalising immigrants and an ‘us and
them’ approach to the world founded on the belief in the inherent
superiority of white western civilisation.

Armstrong and Miller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL1zs4OKYAU

“The political conflicts that characterize multicultural societies can take on a
very different aspect if they are understood to exist firmly in a context
supplied by imperial and colonial history”
“Though that history remains marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing
only in the service of nostalgia and melancholia, it represents a store of
unlikely connections and complex interpretative resources. The imperial and
colonial past continues to shape political life in the overdeveloped-but-no-
longer-imperial countries.” (Gilroy, 2004).

Gilroy connects domestic conceptions of race, racism, immigrants, and national

identity to its imperial reach, affecting both newcomer and native-born. Gilroy
calls for attention to the 20th century “histories of sufferings” in order to
“furnish the resources for the peaceful accommodation of otherness in
relation to fundamental commonality.” Such attentions result in part from
Gilroy’s concerns over the failure of Britain to highlight or even explain their
post colonial conflicts. The near-worship of Second World War era Britain
obscures these realities and fails to account for the changes that have
developed socially and politically.