Mass media representation gendered violence

Abstract

Unfortunately, one of the most obvious and historically consistent elements of gender in media is the notable pervasiveness of representations of gender-based violence (GBV). The linkages in US media representation between masculinity and violence, and between femininity and victimization, are frequently discussed and much studied. Feminist scholars have been examining such representations for several decades, since the 1970s, when groundbreaking analyses, including Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Molly Haskell’s book From Reverence to Rape (1974), and Gaye Tuchman’s essay on “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women in the Mass Media” (1978), highlighted the hostile and violent treatment of women across many media forms, including US prime-time television and Hollywood film. Since that time, scholarship on GBV in pornography, Hollywood film, music videos, computer and video games, news coverage of sexual assault and domestic violence, and certain television genres, including soap operas, forensic and police dramas, made-for-TV movies, and reality policing programs, has become well established. Feminist scholars assert that the objectification of women in mass media not only is a pervasive problem, but also in many instances can be considered a form of violence against women. By treating female characters as objects to be observed, handled, used, abused, and even discarded, mass media encourage us to think of women and girls as less than human. Mainstream media tend to reinforce blaming of individual perpetrators and victims and to lack structural analysis and social explanations for gender-based violence, to circulate stereotypes of helpless victims, to project cultural superiority when different nations or ethnic groups are involved. This chapter surveys our basic understanding of GBV in genres and forms thathave been carefully researched, and outlines some areas in which further investigation is needed. Particular focus is placed on newly emerging areas of emphasis, including the mainstreaming of pornography and pornography-style representation, increasingly problematic relationships between sexuality and sexual violence, and representations of global and international forms of GBV, including rape as a crime of war and human trafficking of sex workers. These emerging areas of investigationconstitute the most significant recent developments in our understanding of media representations of gender-based violence. While each of these three approaches has some advantages and information tocontribute to our general understanding of GBV representation, analytical approaches to the meanings generated through these various discourses on GBV have proven to be more substantive than empirical approaches that focus on cause-effect relationships between violent media images and real-world effects, or empirical approaches that focus on numerical understanding of these representations. This is because the establishment of cause-effect relationships between media imagery and real-world effects, such as changes in cognition and behavior, are difficult to establish and/or prove; findings from such experiments have limited generalizability. The second type of research on GBV in mass media, empirical content-analyses of media imagery that are broad based (for instance studying every episode of every crime drama during a particular year and counting how many acts of violence of different types occurred in them) can be helpful in establishing a framework of understanding of the scope of the issues related to media representation of GBV, but this approach tells us little about why imagery is important and how the details of representation differ from one text, genre, or medium to another. The most well-developed and more currently active areas of study are focused on analyzing images and their meanings within texts rather than in interaction with the world outside of those texts. I focus on knowledge about representations of GBV that has been generated through such textual analysis. I outline basic findings in a broad range of texts and genres, drawing on the most recent examples of scholarship in key areas in which scholarship on mass media representation of GBV is currently developing.