Missing: A Musical Dramedy: Engaging with the missing through the perpetually present

Missing uses a historical reimagining of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey as a launchpad to examine what it is like for a woman of colour to be inundated in a sexist and racist media and cultural spin-cycle. The script tells the story of a young Black girl, Nancy, coming of age and absorbing these cultural messages. In Act 1, Nancy, a child beauty pageant contestant, learns about the death of her friend, JonBenét. Nancy is simultaneously drawn in, obsessed and repulsed by the media storm that follows. In Act 2, indelibly shaped by this childhood event and inspired by her role model Diane Sawyer (pageant winner turned news anchor), Nancy has grown up to be a reporter. She now finds herself peddling similarly problematic stories for ratings and clickbait. Nancy struggles increasingly with both the erasure of identities like her own and the salacious eagerness through which the media (now her job) capitalizes on violence against women in general. The title Missing stems from ‘missing white woman syndrome’ a phrase coined by PBS journalist Gwen Ifill and subsequently adopted by social scientists to refer to the immensely uneven media coverage favouring victims who are upper/middle-class white girls/women in contrast to the coverage and framing of victims of colour. A key goal of the play is to underscore and then question the dominant media representations of women whose stories garner mainstream attention. Whose stories get told? How are they framed? Who, in turn, are marginalized and ignored? How can artists engage representational inequity without inadvertently piling more attention on the already visible? Musicals can and should tackle questions of systemic inequity and inclusion; doing so requires more than positioning protagonists of colour in a theatrical world that fails to acknowledge the systemic realities of our actual one. Missing, a collaborative project in process, tackles these questions.

Media construction of Missing White Woman Syndrome: A cultural complex of innocence

This study assessed whether the media are influenced by the ‘cultural complex of innocence’ first proposed by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung using content analysis. The cultural complex proposed is that Western society may be culturally conditioned to view blonde-haired (and possibly blue-eyed) Caucasian women as the archetypal image of innocence. In this study it was reviewed 53 missing persons’ cases of women across the United States between the years 2000 and 2009. The characteristics of the missing persons analyzed included age, race, hair color, eye color, socioeconomic status, prostitution history, drug history, history of mental illness, etc. Media related to each of the 533 cases was collected from Google News, CNN online, and MSNBC online. The articles were reviewed to determine frequency of keywords relating to the portrayal of the victim used by the three media outlets.