Women and Media

Definitions
♦

♦Discourse
♦Feminism
♦Gender
♦Moroccan Woman &Media
 Introduction
• Communication tells stories, and perhaps more
importantly, they retell stories. Communication,
particularly mass communication and the mass
media, tends to fall into repetitive and recursive
patterns of representation and ideology, ones that
often reinforce the dominant hegemony of a culture
or society. For example, the narratives around
masculinity and sports such as rugby — think of the
way stories about all women are constructed and
reconstructed in the media.
 Discourse
• A term now quite widely used in a number of
different disciplines and schools of thought, often
with different purposes. Most uncontroversially, it is
used in linguistics to refer to verbal utterances of
greater importance than the sentence. Discourse
analysis is concerned not only with complex
utterances by one speaker, but more frequently with
the turn-taking interaction between two or more,
and with the linguistic rules and conventions that are
taken to be in play and governing such discourses in
their given context.
• The term discourse itself is both a noun and a verb. Thus it is
easier to retain the sense of discourse as an act. In its
established usage, discourse referred both to the interactive
process and the end result of thought and communication.
Discourse is the social process of making and reproducing
sense(s).
• Discourse is not a neutral medium for the formation and
transfer of values, meanings and knowledge that exist beyond
its boundaries, rather, it is constitutive of them. That is,
discourse is not best understood as an innocent reflection of
non-linguistic meaning, nor simply in terms of the intentions
of language users. Rather, discourse constructs meaning.
 Feminism
• It is the belief in the social, economic, and political
equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in
the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is
represented by various institutions committed to
activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.
• Throughout most of Western history, women were
confined to the domestic sphere, while public life
was reserved for men. In medieval Europe, women
were denied the right to own property, to study, or
to participate in public life. At the end of the 19th
century in France, they were still compelled to cover
their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a
husband still had the right to sell his wife. Even as
late as the early 20th century, women could neither
vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of
• the United States (where several territories and
states granted woman’s rights long before the federal
government did so). Women were prevented from
conducting business without a male representative,
be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or even
son. Married women could not exercise control over
their own children without the permission of their
husbands. Moreover, women had little or no access
to education and were barred from most professions.
In some parts of the world, such restrictions on
women continue today.
 Gender
• A categorisation that separates men and women on the basis
of assumed behaviours, values, attitudes and beliefs. Gender
has come to be contrasted with sex, which refers to biological
differences. Gender assumptions are based on ideology.
Sexual differences are based on genitalia (biology). While
sexual differences may be natural/scientific, gender
differences are cultural. As with any cultural constructs,
gender roles must be learned, not least through the media.
Early feminist approaches sought to question media
representations of women, and ‘sex-role stereotyping’. More
recent work has reconsidered this aim by asking whether it is
possible for the terms ‘man’ or ‘woman’ to denote a common
identity.
• For many critics, such strand of thinking has
invited attacks from those who argue that gender
is not a matter of discourse or representation so
much as a lived experience. But experience
should not be attributed to distinct genders.
Perceived behavioural differences and the reality
of gender experience themselves result from
discourses and ideology and the culture that
supports them. Thus, we can talk here about
femininity and masculinity.
• Femininity is an identity category that refers to
the social and cultural characteristics associated
with being female while masculinity is an identity
category that refers to the cultural characteristics
associated with being a man. That is, masculinity
is a discursive-performative construction that
describes and disciplines the cultural meaning of
being a man. Masculinity is not an essential
quality of embodied subjects but a matter of
representation.
Moroccan Woman &Media
• Such images of women are based on
stereotypes. Mostly it seems a reflection of
history itself rather than of the Moroccan
society alone, the role of women is depicted
to do cleaning, cooking and taking care of
children and husbands. Women here are
depicted as doing basic housework especially
in rural area.
• These featured advertisements usually depict
Moroccan women as devoted conservative
housewives; all they care about are detergents and
foodstuffs and all they know are cooking, cleaning,
ironing, having kids, raising them, and always making
their husbands satisfied. This idea is of a significant
value because it deals with what a society thinks
about the role of women. It is a confirmation of the
historical framed role which a woman should be
juxtaposed to. It has been normal socially to see
women in kitchens or on laundries.
• Such images are examples of how a role is
constructed. Moroccan women are usually depicted
as obsessed with the households, kitchen and food.
These advertisements play a crucial role in deciding
roles and tasks between men and women.
• This conveys the message that such advertisements
images dictate the roles of people in a society . Such
advertisement may aim seemingly at propagating for
certain products, but there are other discourses in
both images. Women are confined mostly to such
work.
• The other images seem to advocate another different
discourse. Some of advertising constructs an image of the
woman as being simply a sexual object. The other is a far
contrast whereby the woman is depicted as a mule woman
which is obviously a reference to poor Moroccan women and
all the kind of suffering they endure to supply their families.
They are the marginalized class.
• Finally, these images show the gender roles which have been
always believed to be female par excellence and which clearly
restrict women’s role in a society within domestic spheres in
Morocco.