Gender, Media, and Madness: Reading a Rhetoric of Women in Crisis Through Foucauldian Theory

Abstract

The purpose of this review is to situate contemporary research on media representation within a discourse of gender and madness through Foucauldian theory. The review examines five recent texts in media studies:Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation (Cross, 2010); Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Images of Mental Distress (Harper, 2009); Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV (Pozner, 2010); Media Representations of Female Body Images in Women's Magazines (Bale, 2008); and Bad Girls: Cultural Politics and Media Representations of Transgressive Women (Owen, Stein, & Vande Berg, 2007). Through a review of this contemporary scholarship, we argue that media fixation on a rhetoric of women and girls in crisis contributes to our cultural discourse of madness and insanity. Utilizing Foucault's observations about madness and body politics, we expose how madness is constructed as feminine through media discourses that situate women's behaviors in relationship to culturally constructed gender norms.