Stereotypical Representations Research Articles

“I want world peace… oh, and bigger boobs”: repetitions and stereotyping on Friends’ sustainable character Phoebe

ABSTRACT Television (TV) series have emerged as the quintessential entertainment product in popular culture, amplifying their potential for affecting stereotypical representations. However, how stereotypes are embedded and transformed through media has been overlooked. This study investigates repetitions, an essential feature of serial narratives that plays a key role in stereotyping through the construction of characters in TV series. Through a literary deconstructionist analysis of Phoebe Buffay, one of the main characters from the neo-cult TV series Friends, we offer a typology of different repetitions – namely, reproduction, layering and evolution – and show how they contribute to cementing the stereotypes of morally desirable yet deviant behaviours, such as sustainable consumption.

Semiotic Analysis of language in David Henry Hwang's FOB

The current paper attempts to do a semiotic analysis of the play Fresh off the Boat abbreviated as FOB by prominent Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang. FOB talks about the complex cultural identities and experiences of first-generation Asian immigrants and their American-born children. Adapting Ronal Barth’s semiotics as the theoretical framework, the study explores how Hwang employs various linguistic, visual, and performative signifiers to construct and deconstruct notions of "Asianness," assimilation, the difficulties of belonging, and cultural hybridity. The play revolves around a meet-up that is filled with downsizing fresh comers to America leaving the characters in limbo which is between either settling for the host culture or maintaining their previous culture, a battle between acceptance and resistance that is full of symbolic meanings. The analysis focuses on how the play's title, character names, dialogue, stage directions, and symbolic props function as semiotic signs that convey deeper sociocultural meanings. It analyzes how these theatrical elements either reinforce or subvert stereotypical representations of Asian Americans, highlighting the characters' struggles to navigate their bicultural identities.

Exploring Gender Roles and Stereotypes in Literature: An Analysis of Contemporary Works

Purpose: This study aims to explore the representation of gender roles and stereotypes in contemporary literature. The analysis was conducted using secondary data from a variety of literary works published in the past decade. The study aimed to investigate how gender dynamics are portrayed and whether traditional gender roles and stereotypes are reinforced or challenged. Methodology: A comprehensive literature review was conducted to select appropriate works for analysis. A total of 30 novels and short stories were selected across different genres, including fiction, drama, and science fiction. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify common themes and patterns related to gender roles and stereotypes. Findings: The findings of the study revealed a complex depiction of gender roles in contemporary literature. While some works challenged traditional gender norms and portrayed more fluid, non-stereotypical characters, others reinforced traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Additionally, the study found that the portrayal of gender roles varied across genres, with science fiction and fantasy literature often presenting more progressive and diverse gender representations. The study also identified several common stereotypes associated with gender, such as the nurturing and caring nature of women and the dominance and aggressiveness of men. However, it is important to note that these stereotypes were not universally present, and many works depicted characters who deviated from these norms. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how gender roles and stereotypes are represented in contemporary literature. It reveals the complexity and diversity of gender dynamics portrayed in literary works, highlighting both the presence of traditional gender roles and stereotypes and the emergence of more fluid and non-stereotypical characters. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The findings suggest that literature has the potential to challenge and redefine gender norms and that the portrayal of gender roles varies across genres. This study provides insights for scholars, educators, and readers interested in understanding and discussing gender representation in literature and encourages further exploration of gender dynamics in contemporary literary works.

Ann Yearsley and the Poetics and Politics of Breastfeeding

ABSTRACT This article argues that Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman, mother, and poet, not yet fully recovered into the British literary canon, challenges stereotypical representations of breastfeeding mothers created and perpetuated primarily by male authors in Romantic poetry, philosophy, and medical discourse. Her poem “To Mira, on the Care of Her Infant” depicts breastfeeding as a complex labor that requires skill, intelligence, empathy, and discipline. In this poem, Yearsley rejects the arguments of Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Cadogan, who depict nursing mothers as passive vessels of milk or substitutes for a nurturing “mother nature.” I further locate Yearsley in rich networks of subscribers, printers, and periodicals adjacent to canon authors and texts. Thinking particularly about the conventions of epic and georgic forms, and their relationship to nationalism, labor, and motherhood, I ultimately show how Yearsley recasts the nursing mother as a subject rather than an object.

Linguistic Representation of Gender Stereotypes in Spanish

The purpose of this study was to analyse gendered speech standards and patterns in Spanish, considering lexical and grammatical features. The following methods were used in the study: deductive, content analysis, and structural. Furthermore, the lexical materials of researchers who have addressed the issue of gender stereotypes in speech were considered. The results of the study showed that in Spanish, gender stereotypes can transmit and reinforce inequalities between men and women through the use of certain words, phrases, word combinations, and constructions. This is due to the way language is used and understood in society. Linguistic gender stereotypes in Spanish develop in the grammatical, lexical, and semantic fields, considering speech customs that can both strengthen and weaken the role of the individual. The content analysis revealed that gender-neutral templates are beginning to be actively used in the modern Spanish environment, leading to the inclusiveness of the language. With the global development of attitudes towards gender roles, speech stereotypes are changing, most notably in statements, addresses and forms of politeness. However, to effectively overcome linguistic inequality in speech, it is necessary to comprehensively implement the ideology of inclusiveness and gender culture in the fields of education, society, and government, using practical mechanisms that consider race, class, culture, and the role of each person in society.

Female Animal Characters in Roald Dahl’s Children’s Books: A Misogynistic Portrayal

Children’s literature introduces children to the world, stimulates their imagination, and mirrors the society they live in by reproducing its social rules and accepted norms. This is especially true with gender stereotypes, which display and reinforce the masculine and feminine roles constructed by a given society. This binary, onedimensional, and conventional representation is harmful as it negatively impacts young readers’ apprehension of gender roles as well as their personality, behaviour, and aspirations for the future. World-renowned children’s author Roald Dahl has recently been criticised as a controversial author and a racist, misogynistic person. By adopting a feminist literary critical approach, this study analyses Dahl and his illustrator Quentin Blake’s portrayal of female anthropomorphic characters, generally neglected by previous researchers in favour of human characters, in four books: James and the Giant Peach (1961), The Magic Finger (1966), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985). Female characters are weak, inactive, confined indoors, and constantly belittled by their male counterparts who are portrayed as adventurous and as decision makers. Therefore, this study aims to encourage parents and educators to teach young learners to read children’s books with a critical eye to identify and interpret different stereotypical representations.

Challenging gender stereotypes: representations of gender through social interactions in English learning textbooks

This study explores the representation of gender through the social interactions presented in four sets of English textbooks used in China. By examining the representation of both gender stereotypes and changing roles, the results reveal that although traditional stereotypes exist in Chinese secondary school-level English textbooks, women’s changing social roles are acknowledged in that they are now beginning to be shown engaging in non-traditional female jobs. However, in family scenarios, women are still depicted as taking sole responsibility for housekeeping duties without any participation from adult males, showing the incomplete transformation of gender roles. No male characters are shown participating in non-traditional jobs, which reinforces the idea of the masculine role being ‘superior’ to feminine or non-masculine roles. The continued presence of gender stereotypes shows textbook editors’ tacit agreement with the gender norms. Drawing on gender as a fluid concept and social interactions of gender, this study acknowledges the variety and diversity of inputs of gender roles through social interactions in the learning community and suggests that students can be given access to a more gender-progressive education by improving the quality of social interactions between genders in textbooks and presenting a more equal view on gender roles.

Fairness & Privacy in an Age of Generative AI

Generative AI technologies have made tremendous strides recently and have captured the public’s imagination with their ability to mimic what was previously thought to be a fundamentally human capability: creativity. While such technologies hold great promise to augment human creativity and automate tedious processes, they also carry risks that stem from their development process. In particular, the reliance of foundation models on vast amounts of typically uncurated, often web-scraped training data has led to concerns around fairness and privacy. Algorithmic fairness in this context encompasses concerns around potential biases that can be learned by models due to skews in their training data and then reflected in their generated outputs. For example, without intervention, image generation models are more likely to generate images of lighter skin tone male individuals for professional occupations and images of darker skin tone female individuals for working class occupations. This further raises questions around whether there should be legal protections from such pernicious stereotypical representations. Privacy is also a concern as generative AI models can ingest large amounts of personal and biometric information in the training process, including face and body biometrics for image generation and voice biometrics for speech generation. This Essay will discuss the types of fairness and privacy concerns that generative AI raises and the existing landscape of legal protections under anti-discrimination law and privacy law to address these concerns. This Essay argues that the proliferation of generative AI raises challenging and novel questions around (i) what protections should be offered around the training data used to develop such systems and (ii) whether representational harms should be protected against in an age of AI-generated content.

Not (wo)man enough? Representations of gender stereotypes in political comedy coverage of presidential candidates

Not (wo)man enough? Representations of gender stereotypes in political comedy coverage of presidential candidates

Refugee women in the media – prevalence, representation and framing in international media coverage

ABSTRACT Are refugee women invisible in the media? Extant media portrayals often make use of stereotypical representations, in that women are represented as vulnerable and passive victims. Within the theoretical frameworks of agenda setting and framing, vulnerability and agency, digital emotion contagion and distant suffering, this study investigates media coverage on refugee women by four popular international news outlets on the basis of their YouTube presence from 2011 to 2021. We applied automated data gathering to extract relevant videos which were manually coded and analyzed. In addition, we applied an automated topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The results are ambiguous but in general reflect existing findings: refugee women are marginalized in media coverage, and their portrayal is often stereotypical presenting them as vulnerable victims. The results highlight the need to sensitize journalists for a non-stereotypical reporting and the broader public for a more critical stance towards media coverage of refugee women.

Unveiling Masculinity: A Critical Analysis of Gender Representation in Men's Fragrance Advertisements

The aim of this study is to examine how male sexuality is visually portrayed in advertisements for men's perfume and to investigate the notions of masculinity, gender, and sexuality depicted therein. Through a visual text analysis approach rooted in social semiotic theory with literature study, the study examines 27 advertisements predominantly from Western countries (Specifically France and Italy), analyzing elements such as visual composition, gendered representations, and societal implications. The analysis of the sampled images reveals stereotypical representations of male and female sexuality, conveyed through the use of sexuality and gender concepts. For male consumers, exposure to these representations may lead to the internalization of these ideals, influencing their self-image and behavior. These representations not only maintain existing power differentials but also hinder progress towards gender equality and challenging societal norms.

Feeding off Each Other: Journalistic Role Negotiations Between Local and Foreign Reporters in Nairobi

ABSTRACT Nairobi, a vibrant hub for international journalism in East Africa, hosts a varied mix of foreign and national reporters. This paper centres on the interplay between these groups and how their relationships impact their professional role conceptions and performance. It is based on 35 interviews—with Kenyan journalists, media critics and foreign correspondents—and ethnographic data collected in Nairobi in 2021. Findings show that journalists working in Nairobi sometimes understand their job as trying to compensate for the professional roles that their counterparts cannot fulfil—like being a watchdog or disseminator. Foreign correspondents are aware of criticism toward stereotypical representations of Africa in the news media and carefully consider their performances to try to circumvent these, whilst national journalists often motivate their reporting to offer counter-narratives. While at first glance the interaction between these groups is minimal, I pose that it is precisely the constant awareness of each other’s work that generates manifold tensions that, in turn, reflect on their roles and practices.

"STEM in Genere”: an impact evaluation

Research on labour market disparities between men and women has long since identified horizontal segregation in the educational system as one of the main factors driving the gender pay gap. One of the factors identified in the literature believed to be at the heart of horizontal gender segregation is the lack of representation and visibility of women in STEM fields. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a program named “STEM in Genere”, developed within the Gender Equality Plan 2022-2024 of the University of Brescia (Italy), which is aimed at contrasting the underrepresentation and the stereotypical representation of women in science among primary and lower secondary school students. Students of participant classes will meet an educator for a total of 2 hours, in which counter-stereotypical thinking of women in science will be stimulated via learning games. Teachers of participant classes will follow in parallel a dedicated workshop about non-stereotypical science teaching. The effects of the program on students' gender stereotypes in science and study/job aspirations will be evaluated via a randomised controlled trial (RCT) conducted in primary and secondary schools of the Brescia province, an affluent province located in the northern part of Italy. In particular, we will randomise classes within participating schools to have a good balance between the statistical power of the experiment and potential contamination threats. The contribution of this evaluation is threefold. First, we will collect first-hand data on students' views and aspirations in a country - Italy - in which the population traditionally holds quite conservative views about gender roles. Second, we will provide robust, experimental evidence on the effectiveness of the program “STEM in Genere”, which is potentially scalable nationwide. Lastly, we will contribute to the methodological debate about question framing in survey methodology, by randomly varying the formulation of the questions in the surveys. Policy implications for educational and learning environments will be discussed.

BACK TO THE MARKET: EXTENDING IRIGARAY’S READING OF MARX

The study suggests ways to extend Luce Irigaray’s reading of Marx in her article “Women on the Market” by applying it to a number of key issues in the feminist discourse especially the postmodern one. These issues are the relation between the metaphysical and the material, the abstract value and their implications on gender and its constructedness, ecofeminism, and the three social roles/functions of women specified by Irigaray (Mother, Virgin, and Prostitute) in terms of stereotypical representations of women in literature. The author starts with a thorough analysis of Irigaray’s views and shows how they intersect or depart from classical Marxism in terms of the four key issues. The study concludes with some suggestions that, besides putting Irigaray’s remarks to more useful application, would solve some conflicts in the Marxism / Feminism dialogue.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0787/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Communicative Barriers and Stereotypical Representations in the Interactions of Intracultural Groups within the Same Ethnicity with Different Dominant Languages of Communication: A Case Study of Kazakhstan

Communicative Barriers and Stereotypical Representations in the Interactions of Intracultural Groups within the Same Ethnicity with Different Dominant Languages of Communication: A Case Study of Kazakhstan

Representing slavery in visual art: a multimodal approach

Abstract This article explores some issues related to the trauma of slavery, colonialism and identity-formation processes through a multimodal analysis, which is particularly useful in studying the manifold meanings and relationships emerging from the forms of cultural and social representation such as visual art. A series of images, chosen within Ellen Gallagher’s art exhibition “AXME”, held at Tate Gallery in London, is investigated to deal with the discursive constructions of gendered and racial identities. Employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s model (2021 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge), this article attempts to identify the signs related to categories such as gender and race, as well as the persistence of stereotypical representations in our contemporary societies.

Covering the Distant Other: Discursive Construction of the Makoko Community in Nigeria as “Venice of Africa”

ABSTRACT Journalistic texts are sites for the construction of meaning. Through their work, journalists construct, enact, and sustain identities and social realities. In particular, journalistic representations of poverty have implications for how poverty is perceived and addressed, and although extensive research has examined media representations of domestic poverty in the United States, very little is known about how American news organizations represent poverty in other contexts. Nonetheless, Western media have been criticized for presenting a homogenizing and totalizing image of Africa as the “dark continent.” This study explores CNN’s representation of Makoko, a low-income community in Nigeria, as the “Venice of Africa.” Critical discourse analysis of CNN stories about Makoko published between 2012 and 2023 reveals a complicated practice. CNN constructed different identities for Makoko, such as victim, achiever, and spectacle, thereby challenging notions of stereotypical representations of countries in Africa by Western media. However, a predominant focus on success, and the discursive strategy of transforming suffering into artistic spectacle, suggests an exclusive ideology, which contributes to a public ambivalence toward addressing the structural issues faced by this community.

Social Distance of Ethnic Groups: from Proximity to Remoteness (in the Example of Kazakhstan)

The ethno-demographic structure of the population of Kazakhstan is characterized by a high degree of ethno-cultural diversity. In the historical retrospective, the analysis of the conflicts involving ethnic groups allows us to discuss the presence of certain social distances that find their expression with categories such as connection and solidarity, remoteness, and intolerance. Over the years of independence, the country has experienced more than 20 intergroup conflicts related to the interethnic sphere. The causes of similar incidents can be attributed to various factors. The main ones are economic inequality, geopolitical instability, cultural gap, stereotypical representation, etc. The above-mentioned factors, especially stereotypes and prejudice, can be a potential cause-and-effect link in the relationship formation of various degrees of proximity. In this regard, it is worth drawing clear parallels between interethnic attitudes and social distance, which requires a sociological measurement of their interrelation in Kazakh society. The article represents a systematization of manifestation characteristics of the social distance in the context of interaction between ethnic groups across different regions. The proposed work represents one of the initial attempts in the Kazakh ethno-political literature to study the processes of interethnic relations within the framework of the assessment proximity: from readiness for interethnic marriages to the desire for ethnic isolation.

Pixels and Pedagogy: Examining Science Education Imagery by Generative Artificial Intelligence

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) means we are witnessing transformative change in education. While GenAI offers exciting possibilities for personalised learning and innovative teaching methodologies, its potential for reinforcing biases and perpetuating stereotypes poses ethical and pedagogical concerns. This article aims to critically examine the images produced by the integration of DALL-E 3 and ChatGPT, focusing on representations of science classrooms and educators. Applying a capital lens, we analyse how these images portray forms of culture (embodied, objectified and institutionalised) and explore if these depictions align with, or contest, stereotypical representations of science education. The science classroom imagery showcased a variety of settings, from what the GenAI described as vintage to contemporary. Our findings reveal the presence of stereotypical elements associated with science educators, including white-lab coats, goggles and beakers. While the images often align with stereotypical views, they also introduce elements of diversity. This article highlights the importance for ongoing vigilance about issues of equity, representation, bias and transparency in GenAI artefacts. This study contributes to broader discourses about the impact of GenAI in reinforcing or dismantling stereotypes associated with science education.

The ‘China Threat’: Stereotypical representations in the US competition with China

AbstractWhen Donald Trump was elected, the idea of the ‘China Threat’ gained popularity. Nonetheless, this was not a novelty. From the early nineties, when the country consolidated its economic growth, concern had begun to spread that China would convert its economic resources into a military force to turn against the US. This article explores whether the concept of the China Threat may have been influenced by stereotypical representations rooted in US academic thinking and shared at the government level. The analysis proceeds by adopting a three-stage approach. First, it draws a theoretical framework that intertwines a constructivist perspective from IR theory with social psychology, referring to Social Representations Theory and theories of stereotypes. Second, while focusing on the expressions ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ and ‘New Cold War’, it describes how the China Threat has been elaborated in the US scholarly agenda. Finally, it discusses how the China Threat has found an outlet especially in the Trump administration’s narrative.