Gender and the Media (ePub)

Written in a clear and accessible style, with lots of examples from
Anglo-American media, Gender and the Media offers a critical
introduction to the study of gender in the media, and an up-to-date
assessment of the key issues and debates.

Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessment
the book explores the contradictory character of contemporary
gender representations, where confident expressions of girl power
sit alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among young
women, moral panics about the impact on men of idealized
representations of the 'six-pack', but near silence about the
pervasive re-sexualization of women's bodies, along with a growing
use of irony and playfulness that render critique extremely
difficult.

The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows,
magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback
romances - to examine how representations of women and men are
changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to
feminist, queer and anti-racist critique.

Gender and the Media is also concerned with the
theoretical tools available for analysing representations. A range
of approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory are discussed,
and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash,
and positive images are for making sense of gender in today's
Western media. Finally, Gender and the Media also raises
questions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critique
and intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotation
marks seem to protect much media content from criticism and when
much media content - from Sex and the City to revenge adverts - can
be labelled postfeminist.

This is a book that will be of particular interest to students
and scholars in gender and media studies, as well as those in
sociology and cultural studies more generally.