Voice and Media Construction: Cooptation and Control - Essay Example

Cunningham in his review of Life's coverage of the rural poor in the Great Depression discovers that, consistently, the poor were placed into conceptual categories based on race and their precise class background: The white poor were treated either as pioneers, dislocated by no fault of their own thanks to geography (but not thanks to the operations of capitalism's contradictions), or “white trash” whose irrationality and cultural inferiority had guaranteed their irrelevance and thus their poverty.

Meanwhile, Janiurek in Sounding Gender(ed) notes that while there are certainly objective differences in (literal) voice created by physiological variation among people, there are also subjective differences in the presentation and reception of both literal and figurative voice between men and women: Both men and women learn to stylise their literal and figurative voice in a type of 'drag' in order to avoid social sanction. Cunningham and Janiurek are focusing on two very different topics, but both are discussing how presentations of repressed social groups are constructed socially even when there are pretenses to objectivity in those presentations, and how the voice of the repressed is coopted for the needs of elites.

Voice, in Janiurek's explicit and Cunningham's implicit definition, is not only the literal auditory creation of the larynx but also the specific “individual or collective self-representation” of a subject. A person or group's voice includes what they say and what they do not say, the values they express, the culture they generate, the specific needs they highlight and elevate. Janiurek's research suggests that, contrary to physiological and psychological research that argues that the former is distinct from the latter and determined almost exclusively by underlying physiology and psychology, is heavily socially constructed: The literal way that someone sounds, such as pitch, tone, frequency and amplitude, is part of a social self-representation.

Simply put, a woman who speaks too deeply or loudly, or a man who speaks too softly or quietly, is put into a position where her or his gender can be challenged, with commensurate social risks. Cunningham's treatment of voice, meanwhile, is actually the treatment of the elite voice. Just as psychologists and physiologists make a pretense, however sincere, to arguing that the voice that they are representing as objectively distinct is determined only by the factors under their purview, so too do the media claim that their presentation of the voices and needs of the poor is objectively transmitted by the poor and by the lived circumstances thereof.

But the former assumption is just as erroneous as the latter: The media select, crop, distort, transmit and choose very carefully. Just as men and women, in Janiurek's view, alter their voice as a form of “drag” to more closely match pre-existing cultural schema, so too do the media in Cunningham's view attempt to imitate the poor, coopting their voice almost through a ventriloquism. One of the things that Cunningham discusses is the nature of the absurdity of these presentations: For example, one Life piece argued that, by 1934, the nation had begun to crawl out of the Depression, barring the “Okies!

” This is an absurd claim, as the Depression would continue to be felt even through the New Deal and, in fact, into World War II (while prosperity was coming, it would not be felt by most because of rationing). There is also an element of the theatre of the absurd in Janiurek's work,