Pamela
Creedon, Women in Mass Communication, Ch 1 The Challenge of Revisioning Gender
Values pp3-23,Sage Publications, London, 1993
Revisioning is looking back, seeing from a
new critical direction, to understand assumptions in cultural history. In this context exposes hegemonic assmptions
about race, class, sexual preference, ethnicity and gender roles.
The prevalence of women in journalism was
expected to lead to change in how gender assumptions were portrayed. It did not.
Values in the mass communication field remained the same.
Feminists believe gendering commences “the
moment a baby takes its first breath of cultural pollution[1]”. Feminist ontology (the study of how we are)
indicates the gendering process commenced in the Enlightenment (1700s
philosophical movement) when thinking was organized into binaries – mind/body,
public/private, nature/culture, reason/emotion.
It made an assumption that these binaries also had a male/female
division. Although feminists have derided these assumptions, white western
society lives in a culture built on gender assumptions, leading to gender
asymmetries and inequalities being normalized.
George Gerbner[2]
identified how cultural resistance to change takes place. When the dynamics of a social movement
threatens to overpower or rerstructure a specific set of social relations or
values, 3 main cultural resistance activities come into play: discrediting, isolating and undercutting. I would add ignoring to this list.
Media coverage of feminism tends to be
negative and plays in 3 storylines:
1.
Women’s emancipation is ok, but
feminism is deviant
2.
Feminists do not represent
‘ordinary’ women’
3.
Feminism is anti-men. [3]
There are many versions of feminism. Cirksena & Cuklanz have identified 5
feminist frameworks for communication studies based upon basic binaries:
Liberal (reason and emotion)
Socialist (public and private)
Radical (nature and culture)
Psychoanalytic (subject and object)
Cultural (mind and body)
They have identified 3 feminist approaches
to challenge the imposed gender values that structure the system:
Integration
Accepting and valuing masculine and feminine to achieve wholeness
Valorising the female Placing more value on female associated attributes
Rejecting binaries for a more diverse
concept of the world. Accept human identity is a product of
multiple intersections eg race, gender, ethnicity, orientation etc.[4]
Strategies cascading from these theories
are Liberal or Radical. The liberal
approach seeks reformation of the existing system; the radical approach seeks
transformation by the creation of a new order.
Often the projects that take place are promoted by both liberal and
radical feminists.
Quantitative techniques distort women’s
diverse experiences and silence the female voice by boxing them in categories
pre-defined by researchers. Eg in the
USA, mainstream interpretations of the First Amendment Freedom of Speech, is
interpreted as freedom from government interference in speech, rather
than a right to speak. Women are
often denied the opportunity to speak and be heard. Female centred insights
into research are often ignored.
Resistence to hearing the female voice is
frequently experienced, particularly when it pushes intellectual boundaries in
scholarship. Resistence takes 3 forms:
1.
Annihilation
2.
Accommodation
3.
Appropriation.
Annihilation is where feminists
contributions are ignored. Symbolic
annihilation of women in media content is stereotypical, demeaning, or
trivializing. Ramona Rush created a
Scholargate’s Dirty Tricks and identified how women are eradicated from
academia – not inviting qualified women to be part of a research team,;
recommending only men as thesis/doctoral committee chairs, selectively
excluding papers, awards and offices from reports and evaluations.[5]
Accommodation acknowledges the feminist
scholarship in research, but not using it to advance meaning or understanding,
because interpretation of findings is based on traditional, dominant
values. The traditional research
framework is also prepared to selectively use feminist perspectives to fit the
intended message.
Scholarly appropriation is where upcoming
theories (eg framing theory), are primarily claimed by male theorists, when
equally valid sources can be found in feminist literature. particularly Marxist
analysis.
Methodology needs to recognize its
assumptions. Feminist research has 2
underlying assumptions:
1.
All research has a political
dimension.
2.
When the political dimension of
research challenges the dominant (patriarchal) values, it creates controversy.
Given feminist research is going to cause
controversy, the methodology needs to be robust, as it will be challenged.
[1] Pamela Creedon, Women in Mass Communication, Ch 1 The Challenge of
Revisioning Gender Values pp3-23,Sage Publications, London, 1993
[2] George Gerbner, The dynamics of cultural resistence. In Gaye
Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, & James Benet (Eds) Hearth & Home:
Images of women in the mass media; pp46-50. New York: Oxford University Press
1978
[3] Elisabeth van Zoonen, The Women’s Movement and the Media:
Contstructing a public identity.
European Journal of Communication, 7, 453-476 1992
[4] Cirksena, Kathryn & Cuklanz, Lisa, Male is to female as _ is to _: A guided tour
of five feminist frameworks for communication studies. In Lana F. Rakow (Ed), Women making meaning:
New feminist directions in communication (pp 11-44). Norwood, NJ: Ablex
[5] Ramona Rush, Old issues – unresolved: Women educators’ status in
the academy. Paper presented at the
annual convention of the Associaiton for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication, Montreal. 1992
