Stereotypical Representations Research Articles

Teaching School Genetics in the 2020s: Why "Naive" Mendelian Genetics Has to Go.

Whereas Mendelian genetics is an important research program in the life sciences, its school version is problematic. On the one hand, it contains stereotypical representations of Gregor Mendel's work that misrepresent his findings and the historical context. This deprives students from gaining an authentic picture of how science is done. On the other hand, what most students end up learning in schools are extremely simplistic accounts of heredity, whereby alleles directly control traits and phenotypes, and thus exclusively depend on which allele an individual has. Such oversimplifications of Mendelian genetics as those that we still teach in schools were exploited by ideologues in the beginning of the twentieth century to provide the presumed "scientific" basis for eugenics. This paper addresses these problems of the school version of Mendelian genetics, which I call "naive" Mendelian genetics. It also proposes a shift in school education from teaching how the science of genetics is done using model systems to teaching the complexities of development through which heredity is materialized.

A tulajdonnevek műfajépítő szerepe a Sorsod Borsod című regionális krimiben

The paper aims to show the role of proper names in defining the novel Sorsod Borsod [‘Borsod is Your Fate’] as a regional crime novel. A further objective is to demonstrate how proper names are used to connect the text of this literary work to the elements of reality and to examine the role played by the reader’s competence in naming practices when distinguishing between fictional and real-life names. The paper provides a brief overview of the source text, outlining the genre-specific characteristics of regional crime fiction. It presents the framework in which the proper names of the novel are analysed. Then, it examines the relationship between the fictional names and the genre-specific characteristics of the novel (representations of topographical features, stereotypes, local spaces and persons). The comprehensive analysis of names encompasses place names, institutional names, personal names, animal names, and other types of names of the region depicted in this crime fiction. The paper examines the presence of ethno-stereotypes in personal names and suggests that proper names may serve as regional labels. The analysis concludes that the novel is dominated by fictional place names that link the textual world to the real world. Moreover, a significant proportion of the surnames in the novel are fictional names reflecting the settlement names of the real-world region. The author has clearly made an effort to follow real-world name patterns in all types of names. The paper states that proper names in this work play an important role in building up the genre of the regional crime novel, as they contribute to the representation of regional particularities rather than to the plot, period or characterisation in the novel.

Becoming Yoga Bodies of Instagram: Women’s Agency, Platform Negotiations and Everyday Activism

Women’s yoga bodies have been overutilised in mainstream media through their stereotypical representation aligned with the market forces. Previous studies have shown the domination of similar visuals in yoga spaces on Instagram, following the algorithmic platform structures. Avoiding the dichotomy of subject–object bodies, this article brings out women participants’ living experiences of becoming yoga bodies on Instagram and their practices countering the dominant visual culture related to yoga bodies. The article argues that women use ‘everyday activism’ on Instagram to formulate their yoga body experiences. These findings are based on in-depth interviews with 17 women yoga practitioners active on Instagram. The analysis reveals the emergence of three main themes contributing to the ‘becoming of yoga bodies on Instagram’, namely (a) reclaiming the space through increased visibility, (b) training gazes towards women’s yoga bodies and (c) breaking the yoga body stereotype.

“Mama Majuto”: A Reflection on Playing Mzungu in Tanzanian Video Films

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse the ambiguous characterisation of the mzungu in Tanzanian films as well as the perception of the mzungu in general. Using the example of several films by Mussa Banzi, Mustafiri West and Kulwa Kikumba in which I acted, I discuss how, through the representation of common wazungu stereotypes, I have become the object of reflections and negotiations that – primarily satirically – process the relationship between Tanzania and Germany, East Africa and the global North. As a mzungu ethnographer and like the many white scholars before me, I was warmly and politely welcomed by the filmmakers to watch their work as well as to add a comical figure to the repertoire of Tanzanian movie characters. My performances in Swahili films opened up extraordinary opportunities to connect, become a scholar and even a “celebrity”. The Tanzanian filmmakers, on the other hand, benefited from the white guest actor as a teaser and especially as a comic extra for the films. I argue that, through this collaborative work, the role of the researcher as expert was challenged and, to some extent, the power relations between researcher and researched were reversed or at least disrupted.

Investigating the relationship between stereotyping and creativity during marketing campaigns in marketeers and audiences

Stereotyping others in a creative process may negatively affect creative output, yet there is currently scant empirical evidence of a link between stereotyping and creativity; here, we explore this link in marketing communications. In a quasi-experiment, we introduced a novel intervention to disrupt marketeers’ dependency on stereotypes and boost their creativity. The intervention decreased marketeers’ use of stereotypes when selecting consumer labels—descriptive labels of a typical consumer based on consumer information—while enhancing the creativity of ideas. In another set of online experiments, we asked British residents to rate the creativity of advertisements and purchase intentions toward advertising products with different levels of stereotypical depictions of people. We found a linear relationship between the stereotypical depictions of people in advertisements and perceived creativity. We also observed a potential U-shaped relationship between stereotypical representations of people in advertisements and purchase intention, such that advertisements with low and high stereotypical representations induced greater purchase intention than did those with medium stereotypical representations. Finally, we discuss the psychological mechanisms that potentially link stereotyping and creativity and the implications for marketing communications.

The Phases Of Showalter’s Feminist Criticism Prefigured In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Elaine Showalter (1941- ) is one of the most influential American literary critics and feminists who influenced feminist literary criticism by developing the concept and practice of gyno-criticism. She published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing in 1977 and whose expanded edition came out in 1999. By and large this book explicates Showalter’s groundwork to revive the interest in long-forgotten women writers in British literature history. It was a monumental work, indeed a kind of rediscovery, mapping widely rather than mining deeply the territory of women’s writing. In a sense, feminist criticism came of age with this book. Showalter suggests that women themselves were slowly growing aware of their separateness from men and leaving a record of that awareness in their works. It is the growth of a collective selfconsciousness—the history of a distinct literary subculture—that A Literature of Their Own sets out to record. ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ (1979) is one of her well known essays that focused on the feminist literary criticism of the literature. In this essay, Showalter has rejected the inevitability of the male theories and male models by tracing the history of women’s literature in the present writing. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Showalter also refers to the three phases of feminist literary criticism. The first phase is the feminine phase where women aimed to compete with male writers, and compared their craft with that of their male contemporaries. The second phase is the feminist phase where the critics focus on the injustices and wrongs done to women in literary texts, and reject the conventional roles of females. Finally, the female phase is independent of the dependency on and obsession with the male literature. It instead aims to focus on creating a female literary tradition that includes women's internal experiences and personal history. This theoretical literary presentation of Showalter can be dramatically viewed in the evolution of character Nora in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (1828 -1906). Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. He was one of the founders of modernism in theatre and often called “the father of realism” and the most influential playwright of the 19th century. A Doll’s House is a three acts play through which Ibsen challenged the stereotypical representation of women in literature with his female characters and remains a great contribution to feminist literature

“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.

EXAMINING POWERS THROUGH SURYANI’S REPRESENTATION AGAINST SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WREGAS BHANUTEJA’S PHOTOCOPIER

This study examines the representation of woman against sexual violence in Photocopier, an Indonesian film directed by Wregas Bhanuteja. In film, women as sexual violence victims are often misrepresented through stereotyping as the helpless victims who need men’s help to deal with the situation or showing extreme violence against their perpetrators to exact revenge. If not stereotyped, women as sexual violence victims also tend to be fetishized as their victimized body often sexualized for erotic pleasures. In its protagonist, Sur, Photocopier took different approach by representing the victim as a woman with powers to fight against the sexual violence she experienced. This study focuses in examining how Sur exerts her powers and how those powers impacted the sexual violence case that she experienced. The study is conducted qualitatively using content analysis method which examines the visual aspects as well as dialogues from the film and applying Amy Allen’s theory of feminist power relation. The analysis identifies that Suryani possesses and exercises all three types of feminist power posed by Allen, which are “power-to,” “power-over,” and “power-with,” as a sexual violence victim. The study reveals that while the film tries to represent Sur as a powerful woman, she is also adjacently represented as a stereotypical powerless sexual violence victim who is helpless to fight against her perpetrators even after exercising all her powers both personally and collectively. However, such stereotypical representation may be necessary to show the reality of sexual violence victims and as a form of criticism against the mishandling of sexual violence case.

Universalization of Stereotypical Representation and Subjugation of Women in The Waste Land

Universalization of Stereotypical Representation and Subjugation of Women in The Waste Land

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.

Towards inclusivity: Dalit women’s representation in contemporary Telugu cinescapes

Cinema acts as a cultural product, a medium of expression and a source of popular entertainment; usually it appears to conscientiously genuflect to upper-caste dictums. Since its inception, Telugu cinema, or Tollywood, the third-largest film industry in India, has produced various caste-based films like Gudavalli Ramabrahmam’s Malapilla (1938), Kasinadhuni Vishwanath’s Kalam Marindhi (1972) and K. Balachander’s Rudraveena (1988), amongst others. In the discourse surrounding caste, the ‘Dalit woman question’ and its representation is either consciously ignored or erased, and thus, it stands enfolded in upper-caste reformist politics. This article analyses the representation of Dalit women in select Telugu films produced at significant sociopolitical junctures of contemporary times. These films mark a significant departure from the stereotypical representation of Dalit women as submissive and portray them as women with voices. Within the larger framework of feminist activism and human rights discourse, we see Dalit women protagonists in these films with an agentic space of their own. In the Indian context, where equality and no discrimination are constitutional rights, the films under discussion, Srikanth Addala’s Narappa (2021) and Sekhar Kammula’s Love Story (2021), are an appropriate intervention to showcase the inclusivity of Dalit women in the larger scheme of Indian feminism. This study employs critical textual and frame analysis to read selected Telugu films as cultural texts with Dalit feminist consciousness embedded within them.

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.