“How my hair look?”

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiuana Lopez ◽  
Mary Bucholtz

Abstract This article builds on research in queer linguistics and linguistic scholarship on race in the media to examine the semiotic representation of race, gender, and sexuality in The Wire, often considered one of the most “authentic” media representations of Blackness. Based on an analysis of the entire series, the article argues that this authenticity effect is partly due to the show’s complex African American characters, who reflect a range of gendered and sexual subjectivities. The analysis focuses on three queer Black characters on The Wire who are represented as both “authentically queer” in their social worlds and “authentically Black” in their language. However, the semiotic authenticity of the series is linked to its reification of familiar stereotypes of Blackness, especially hyperviolence and hypermasculinity. Thus, these characters both contest and complicate traditional representations of queerness and gender while reinforcing problematic representations of Blackness for its largely white, affluent target audience.

2011 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny J. Andrés

The diary of Nora Kreps, a young Anglo teacher of adult Americanization in the Imperial Valley, 1923-1924, reveals not only her own attitudes toward immigrant cultures and race, class relations, and gender and sexuality, but those on which the Americanization program was based. Her account, written at the request of the Survey of Race Relations at Stanford University, offers us a window into the complicated racial hierarchy of the region. Kreps' candid remarks about her students and her contacts with the community's elites uncover immigrant and African American agency in pursuit of upward mobility as well as the prejudices and goals of the local agribusiness-dominated society. In the mid-1920s₁ in a wave of nativist sentiment, Kreps' observations were swept aside. Now rediscovered, they provide a valuable tool for understanding the complex social and cultural interactions in the early twentiethcentury Imperial Valley.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Walton

NBA player Latrell Sprewell’s attack on his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, in 1997, received extraordinary attention in the media. The coverage of the incident and subsequent trial revealed the media’s attitude toward violence within cultural representations of sport. This paper focuses on the way that violence associated with sport can be understood in relationship to the normalization of violence against women in American culture. Specifically, I focus on how the violent acts of athletes and coaches elicit different social responses depending on the social status of the victim. I argue that media representations, framed within narratives that construct their importance around gendered ideas of private and public spheres, work to support current race, class, and gender hierarchies. I also offer alternative ways of understanding the incident given the peculiar work setting of professional sport.


Tripodos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Viktorija Car ◽  
Barbara Ravbar

Violence against women and girls in the 21st century remains a common and profoundly consequential violation of women’s human rights. It is part of gender inequality, an integral part of the social system, and linked to other aspects of human and economic development. When reporting about it, the media produce additional damage by continuously highlighting the hostile and violent treatment of women. Representations of gender and sexuality in the news reinforce the common perception that women are sexual objects and therefore disadvantage women, continuously reinforcing imbalances of power between women and men. This study explores media representations in Croatian online media articles about violence against women. The results of analysis show how violence against women is framed as a private problem, how women are addressed as unfaithful wives and prostitutes which gives excuses for the perpetrator while the blame for the violence is partly shifted to the woman. Also, results show how the secondary victimization is manifested in articles, and how violence against women as a topic is exploited to attract the readers’ attention.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maddalena Fedele ◽  
Maria-Jose Masanet ◽  
Rafael Ventura

This study was carried out in three Iberian-American countries, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela, to identify the stereotypes of love and gender professed among youth and compare them to those they prefer in television fiction series, i.e., those able to influence their identities and values. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the study involved a survey of 485 first-year university students, and a qualitative analysis of the media representations preferred by them. The results showed a preference for "amor ludens", based on enjoyment and the present moment, and a gap between the cognitive and emotional spheres of some youth who consider themselves distant from stereotypical, heteronormative and patriarchal models, but who choose media representations that match these models and the traditional gender portrayals.


2020 ◽  
pp. 132-159
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon

Chapter 5 details how Black Press news coverage produced a black public sexual sphere that allowed readers to debate homosexuality and gender-noncomforming expression’s position in early-twentieth-century black communities. As the Black Press worked to transform negative images of blackness, they held homosexual life and gender-nonconformity up as a spectacle that could not seamlessly fit into notions of African American respectability. Nonetheless, regular coverage in the Black Press proved that editors believed that readers enjoyed reading articles and viewing images about female impersonators and gay men. In presenting readers’ responses to this coverage, chapter 5 draws attention to instances of contest and negotiation between diverse African American readers as they struggled to understand the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality.


Sexualities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 212-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Maree

Representations of gender and sexuality in mainstream media operate to both shape the contours of, and contest the limits to, sexual citizenship. The ‘citational practices’ of media representations mould contemporary understandings of these limits. In this article, the author examines mainstream and social media reports of two separate same-sex wedding ceremonies in Japan; the first at a queer community event in 2007 and the second at a major theme park in 2013. Through citations and quotations, a multitude of voices are embedded in the media texts. In the 2007 case, increased media visibility is mitigated by citational practices that clearly mark the same-sex wedding as devoid of legal standing. Whereas media reports situate the 2013 ceremony in the context of marriage equality trends internationally, an instance of possible discrimination is emphasised as being a ‘misunderstanding’. Similarly, a microanalysis of a light news documentary of the ceremony uncovers citational practices that highlight the importance of ‘forgiveness’ or ‘tolerance’ for ‘mutual coexistence’ in society. Furthermore, the reporting confines the ceremony to a ‘fairytale’-like ‘foreign’ domain. The process of ‘othering’ issues of sexual citizenship is linked to a cyclical process since the 1950s wherein representations of queerness are posited as ‘new’ forms of being in Japan. Discourse surrounding sexual citizenship is thereby projected into a non-domestic, non-specific future time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alcina Pereira de Sousa ◽  
João Silva

AbstractThe present article offers a contrastive analysis of articles published online by two media outlets of two different countries (Portugal and the USA) dealing with science, technology and interrelated topics. In so doing, the goal is to explore the role played by gender dynamics in the pragmatic strategies which underlie the communication of scientific knowledge to the wider audiences by the mainstream media. The multi-layered interpretative approach centred on corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis and visual semiotics adopted in this paper, it is argued, allows for a more holistic understanding of the role played by the media in the perpetuation of power imbalance and gender stereotypes among their readership(s), better understood here as discursive communities, and their everyday communicative practices. It is further suggested that an analysis of how knowledge is mediatized can offer ways into understanding wider cultural patterns and values.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 6316-6320

This scientific research deals with the actual problem, that is the study of the language of criminal chronicles in the Western Ukrainian media discourse in the 1920-1930s. Object of analysis is news reports on gender violence in popular Western Ukrainian newspapers of the interwar twenty years. The chosen methodology is feminist discourse-analysis which allows us to identify the media representations of gender identity and to find out what ideological discourse has had symbolic hegemony, which gender regime was supported by language. It turns out that the language of criminal news fixes symbolic mechanisms for establishing power regimes. The texts of criminal news show gender stereotypes and prejudices against women, which traditionally functioned and articulated in public discourse. Gender violence was explained (and justified) by personal, religious and social reasons. The problem of domestic violence attracted journalists from the 1920s and 1930s. Victim women who dared to challenge patriarchal customs were appraised extremely subjectively, biasedly, often – in a negative way. Publications about sexual crimes (rape, sexual harassment) were rare, since this topic was banned in the Western Ukrainian public discourse of the 1920s-1930s. In Western Ukrainian popular magazines, the language of criminal news construed a gendered society, deleting power for men and exposing a woman to objectification. Journalists used certain linguistic strategies to support the dominant gender regime: author's intentionality, peculiar journalistic formulation and focus of information, the specifics of structuring material and hidden meanings of the text.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.


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