The Media Reinforce Class, Gender or Race Inequalities - Essay Example

Sociology Name Institution Date The media reinforce class, gender or race inequalities Introduction Media institutions play a significant role in our consumption-centred, mediated society as they produce and convey important information. Most of what listeners know and are concerned about is founded on the descriptions, representations as well as stories in movies, radio, TV, music among others. They way people define their social identities; the way they take man, woman, black or white to mean is influenced by co-modified contents fashioned by media for listeners that are more and more divided by social creations of ethnic and femininity. In summary, media are key to what eventually appear to signify our social authenticities. Our culture influences our understanding of gender despite the fact that biology forms the basis for sex differences. Culture is the process by which individuals socialize and thrash about the connotations of our social experiences, social associations and hence ourselves. Gender is a social construction by which a community defines what it implies to be male or female. Similarly, race too is a social creation since it cannot be classified under biology as it has small root in science or heredity. Physical characteristics like hair and skin colour act as bad identifiers of ethnicity. The ethnic groupings we employ to distinguish individual diversity have been constructed and modified to fulfil the vibrant societal, political, and financial wants of our people. The argument that ethnicity and gender are social creations emphasizes their fundamentality to the developments of individual authenticity. Understanding this helps us comprehend the complicated part played by media institutions in influencing our more and more gender and racial based media customs. This paper explores several ways in which the media has reinforced class, gender and race inequalities. Media play a major role in the creation and conveying of gender dogmas. It, thus, also plays a significant part in gender socialization. Gender media researches have a trend of privileging gender and white females, especially, over other social classifications of knowledge, like race and class. Researchers of black feminist have accredited the ignorance that females of colour, particularly black females, have faced during their discriminatory enclosure in the works of feminist intellectual study. The mainstream media has been greatly criticized by most modern academic research for their harmful portrayals of black females (Hill Collins, 2000, 2004; Perry 2003, Manatu, 2003). The media has depicted the black women as nannies, matriarchs, jezebels, care takers and disastrous mulattoes. The way in which the black women are depicted in the media influences how black individuals are viewed and how other classes will react to them founded on their association with these created descriptions. The media representations of black female are a product of prevailing ethnic, gender, and class ideologies (Hill Collins, 2004). These labels gradually reveal and misrepresent both the manners in which black female see themselves (personally and communally) and the manners in which they are perceived by others. Researchers have conducted research on how black women are depicted in a range of media environments. Meyers (2004) employed dialogue study to assess the depiction of aggression against black female in home television news reporting for the period of “Freaknik,” a spring period ceremony conducted in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1990s. She found out that the reports depicted the majority of the black females as stereotypic Jezebels whose vulgar behaviour aggravated physical attack. Semiotic scrutiny of the biracial identify personality in Queen, Alex Haley’s miniseries, shows how Queen fell in love with conventional stereotyping of other bi-racial personalities like good-looking, though aggressive, innately difficult, and intended for madness. The soap opera ‘All My Children’ often depicted black females as matriarchs. Indeed, it represents the black female as oversexed desire object, taking over matriarch, and non-hostile, desexualized mammy figure continues to be the most relentless in the media. It is interesting that some media operated by black males also engages in misogynistic representations of black females. It is evident that most black independent movies tend to give the whites’ capitalist patriarchy supremacy over the blacks’. Black independent films are dominated by the leading white, male, heterosexual domination that has thrived in colonizing most of us (Martin & Yep, 2004). Lee’s movies depict women who are defined by the males in their lives. His films gradually carry on sexist customs as they associate with black womanhood. Even if they are other black men film producers who carry on unconstructive depictions of females, Lee has been considered most by cultural opponents (Brooks, & Hébert, 2004). Further research is needed in this area as most black men film producers are shifting from the boundaries of autonomous cinema to the core of multibillion cash studios and systems that are operated by straight white men, hence probably leading to black females’ domination. TVs have a tendency of restricting black woman responsibilities to white replicas of excellent wives and to black matriarchal labels. A perfect example is the assessment of the portrayal in the CBS workplace company Frank’s place. These series offers a good illustration of a feminist contextual examination of the connection between race and gender from an intellectual research viewpoint. Although the series offers motivation from the circumstances comedy’s connection with the female, they operated from a specifically male viewpoint. Despite the fact that Frank’s Place offered a quite broad variety of depictions of black males, it presented a narrower variety of depictions of black females. The consideration it provided to discriminations in skin colour and class was seldom given to its women personalities. Alternatively, woman prettiness was associated with brown skin, long hair, slenderness, young age, and middle class. Regardless of the film’s alert effort to demonstrate the social effects of the depiction of ethnic diversity, it was unconscious to the manners in which gender and class affect race (Byers & Dell, 1992). Most research studies have focused on traditionally placed unconstructive depictions of black females, and the most current academic tendency in black gender media research is the depiction of black woman femininity in the media. Sexuality is argued in accordance to how trendy culture has objectified the black woman body as oversexed and not in reference to sexual point of reference. Several researchers argue that black females are depicted merely as sex objects instead of passionate characters, as shown in Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning performance. She acted as a hyper sexed jezebel as well as disastrous mulatto all together. Some argue that the normal creation of a rebellious female’s sexual representation might bring about culturally definition of females. Music videos have also adapted the black jezebel myths taken by films and television. Popular culture nowadays borrows greatly from the artistic production and fashions of city Black adolescence. The oversexed black female has turn out to be an idol in hip-hop culture through this black artistic production, modified through the notion of social class. The knowledge of the body as well as how black females are represented as sex objects stimulates this discussion that has turn out to be famous in scholarly spheres. The representation of black females’ bodies in hip-hop music videos is especially troubling since these video are produced particularly by black males. Music films plays into man sex desires and that the idea of the black female as a prostitute is constantly situated in conflict with the representation of black female as nanny. The music films of white hip-hop musicians pursue the same misogynist principle in which poorly dressed female encircle the musician in a poolside, hot tub, or disco scenery. Perfect examples include the Latino musicians Fat Joe and Geraldo (commonly branded Rico Suave), as well as white musicians Justin Timberlake and Vanilla Ice, replacing Latina and white females’ bodies for black ones (Rojas, 2004). This argument turns out to be most important as white-centred video music channels like MTV and VH-1 devote more encoding time to hip-hop customs and form late night programs intended to demonstrate supposed nonstop and unrestricted films that create apparent suggestions to the traditions of strip discos and pornography. Fiske (1996) assets, “Whiteness is particularly adept at sexualizing racial difference and thus constructing its others as sites of savage sexuality” (p. 45). The mass media supports images of a perfect body form just as the theories of the body. The information that these films propel to young female concerning their bodied is negative (Perry, 2003). The prettiness model for black females reflected in these films is as not probable to attain as the waif-thin representations in Vogue magazine are for White females. Apart from the black body model of big breasts, slim waist and large buttocks reflected in films, several of the black females featured portray a Westernized good looks perfect of brown skin, straight hair, and black or blue eyes (Martinez, 2004). The black females featured in music represent bodily character of the disastrous mulatto. Racialist and sexist thoughts tell the manner in which colour-caste hierarchies influence black women. The physical characteristics that defines the attractiveness of a woman in the racist white thoughts and in the colonized black attitude include brown skin and long, straight hair. Stereotypically depicted as exemplifying a loving, physical eroticism, and an inferior female character, the biracial female has been and continues to be the criteria other black women are evaluated against. The other side of this argument relates to how harmful sex images are associated with black woman sex agency. Most black female’s rappers categorize woman sexuality as part of females’ liberty and freedom (Rockler, 2002). References Brooks, D. E., & Hébert, L. P. (2004). Lessons learned or bamboozled? Gender in a Spike Lee film. Unpublished manuscript. Byers, J., & Dell, C. (1992). Big differences on the small screen: Race, class, gender, feminine beauty, and the characters at “Frank’s Place.” In Lana F. Rakow (Ed.), Women making meaning: New feminist directions in communication (pp. 191–209). New York: Routledge. Dines & J. Humez (Eds.), 2004. Gender, race, and class in media: Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fiske, J. (1996). Media matters: Race and gendering U.S. politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd Ed.). New York: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (2004). 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(2002). Race, whiteness, “lightness,” and relevance: African American and European American interpretations of Jump Start and The Boondocks. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19, 398–418. Rojas, V. (2004). The gender of Latinidad: Latinas speak about Hispanic television. Communication Review, 7, 125–153. Read More