Gender and the Media. Weitzer and Kubrin (2009) Misogyny in Rap Music

Gender and the Media

Weitzer and Kubrin (2009) Misogyny in Rap Music

The article addresses the question how prevalent misogynistic themes in music are and what specific messages they convey. This questions are addressed through content analysis of more than 400 songs. 5 themes related to image of women in songs are documented and linked to larger cultural and social context.

Images of women in popular music: Often women are presented as inferior to men, marginalized, trivialized.. There is a great diversity, complexity in how women are presented. Although this trend changes over time, still it is uncommon that women are presented as independent, intelligent, superior to men.

Rock music: 57%-unintelligent, sex object, victim; 20%-placed women in traditional role such as subservient, nurturing, domestic role; 8%-displayed male violence against women; 14%-fully equal to male.

Rock videos: 57%-women are passive, dependent on men, accentuating physical appearance.

Country music: approximately 67% devalued women; 9% presented women as equal to men.

Special sources of rap music: Three sources are suggested:

• larger gender relations
• the music industry
• local neighborhood

“The larger gender relations” is the most diffuse influence due to cultural understanding of hegemonic masculinity (heterosexual male domination over female). In addition to this, the misogyny in rap music can be perceived as resistance to feminism.

The music industry puts pressure on artists requiring provocative and edgy lyrics in order to increase sales. Those rappers who do not fit these requirements are rejected and marginalized. Therefore, there is a huge amount of rappers who sings songs with “hardcore” lyrics.

Rap music has also local roots which help rappers to write songs. Rap and hip hop initially developed out from the experiences of disadvantaged youth, black neighborhood. Rap is cultural reflection of lives on the streets.

Research methods: All albums that attained platinum status between 1992 and 2000 were identified from Recording Industry Association of America. There were 130 albums, total 1,922 songs. Each song was listened to twice while reading the lyrics at the same time.

Findings:  Misogyny was presented in 22% of 403 listened songs. That is less than what critics say, but still it is a significant number. Female artists were only 5%, therefore this industry can be considered as male dominated.

Content analysis:

• derogatory naming and shaming of women (47%; some rappers say that such naming and shaming is welcomed by music industry)
• sexual objectification of women (67% of all misogynistic songs;  some rappers say that by objectification of women, they put them “on their places”)
• distrust of women ( 47%; “can’t trust ‘em” because teenage girls lie about their age, then these girls  make false accusation of rape in order to get money settlements. Rappers warn men of femme fatale, term used to describe women who use their beauty to use innocent men )
• legitimating of violence against women (18%; women are threaten to be raped if they refuse to have sex; violence is portrayed as appropriate when women forget their, drink too much, or dress inappropriately, even girls in inner city admit it)
• celebration of prostitution and pimping (20% of all songs; in some songs women are reduced to sex organs and not even worth of being paid)

The voices of female rappers:  female rappers were supposed to reject and resist the sexism in men’s songs. However, after the research of female rap song there was very little resistance. In some scenarios, female rappers sang about accepting their men, even if he had sex with other women, since the formers were wives of long-term girlfriends. But the number of the examples of female rappers was very small; therefore it is difficult to make conclusions.

 

Consuming Orientalism

Images of Asian-American Women in Multicultural Advertising

By M. King and A. Chung

Intro:

Print advertising promote images that distort women’s bodies for male pleasure, allow violence agnst women, and consider women’s movement as unserious.

• Research on racial stereotypes in TV, however NO research on the commodified images of Asian American women.
• Causes that transformed cultural content and marketing strategies: trends in the global economy
• Reasons for a great inclusion of Asian and Latino/American women: to diversify their cultural repertoire 
• Main argument: representations of ethnic minority groups in such advertising are usually based on gendered and racialized reflections of global culture that draw on themes of colonialism and American Orientalism

*implicit absence or rarity of Asian/American men

- Images are not ahistorical in origin, instead they emulate popular images of As/Am images of women that have been shaped throughout Am.history.

Another aim of the article: to show how such representations emerge from the specific multicultural and globalized context of post-Civil Rights America that changed the identities of White males

Outline of the article:

The topic of discussion: American Orientalism and its dynamics in advertising and its role in reconstructing As/Am. Women in relation to White Am. within  the globalizing and multicultural context of the US society.

1. a theoretical context for gendered and racial representations of women in the print media in post-industrial America
2. how stereotypical imageries of As/AM. women and commodified Orientalism have evolved in Am. media culture over time
3. analysis of advertisements taken from magazines that have included As/Am women
4. rearticulation of orientalism ideologies in globalized economy

Consuming culture in post-industrial America

• The early representations of America’s consumption relied heavily on images of middle-class White women whose idealistic roles were defined within the context of the modern domestic economy
• A lack of research that analyzes today’s capitalist culture through intersections of race, gender and nativity
• High standards of living that sustain the growing white-collar sector of the Am. economy required employment and exploitation of cheap immigrant labor, esp. women and children from Asia and Latin America.(EXAMPLES: Walmart, Gap, Nike)
• At the same time, the steady growth of low-skilled immigrant workers was accompanied by an inflow of highly-skilled workers and professionals from Asia
• Exporting jobs to the Third World countries (even lower costs: cheap labor, poor labor regulation)
• The colonization of the “Other”
• “Multiculturalism as one of the clever marketing strategies”
•       evokes artificial images of racial unity and harmony among the various cultural groups
•       to achieve 2 things: 1) to expand their market share to a racially diversifying consumers, 2) to obscure the exploitative labor machinery by applying the visual consumption of women’s bodies
• “foreign” and “seductive” appeal of As./Am women to highlight the supremacy of White men

The History of American Orientalism:

• Started from domestic race relations, and diplomatic relations with Asian countries abroad
• Edward W. Said: “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between  Western superiority and Oriental inferiority”
• The Occident (the West) is placed higher than the Orient (the East)
• Depiction of the West: developed, powerful, articulate, and superior; the East: undeveloped, weak, mysterious, and inferior
• European Orientalism: to justify the colonization of Third  World people
• Early American Orientalism: to exclude Asian immigrants from making a home in Am.
• Stereotypes in the form of the aggressive images of Japanese and Chinese immigrants, and to more modern depictions as the passive “model minority”
• The Gold Rush era => As/Am – “pollutants”, Chinese-potential threats to the stability of the White immigrant working class
• *the practice of “consuming Orientalism” evolved long before the advent of the post-industrial era (»20^th century)
• 1950s and 1960s: Model Minority Myth – a belief that As/Am have achieved the Am. dream through hard work and passive obedience
• After WWII and the Korean War: movies like “Flower Drum Song” evolved their plots around less threatening, passive versions of As./Am. characters
• The Civil Rights  era: political context => images of effeminate Asian men and submissive women => to counter images of violent African-Am. and feminists and to demonstrate that familial stability, social mobility, and ethnic assimilation can be achieved peacefully
• “forever foreigners”(EXAMPLES: the Vietnam War: Asians as villains and “gooks”
• The Orient and women as the culturally-inferior Other
• Am. Orientalism depended on the masculine, superior image of White men
• Typical representation of As./Am. women: “the Lotus Blossom baby (e.g. China Doll, Geisha Doll, Geisha Girl, and the shy Polynesian beauty), and the Dragon Lady(e.g. prostitutes and devious madams) => stimulated the sexual voyeurism of White Am.males and the objectification of foreign, exotic Oriental women as their rightful property
• “The World of Suzie Wong” movie => As./Am. women’s shameless sexual desire, their aggressive and manipulative traits, and their inability to resist White men
• Contemporary movies: “Year of the Dragon”, “Heaven and Earth”: As./Am. women are exploited and betrayed by men of their own race but are later saved by White male heroes

Advertising Multiculturalism

• Historically, As-Am. were never targeted as a significant consumer base for many of these marketing campaigns
• Factors: increasing number of ethnic minorities (1980s and 1990s) and their impact as consumers (high levels of income and education), global expansion of corporate branches
• After the Civil Rights mov’t => integration of minority consumers into marketing strategies
• “copycat ad” – traditional advertisements reproduced with models of different races => problematic because it assumed that “Af-Am. and Latinos are simply dark-skinned white people” and ignored the specific consumer needs and ethnic identities of their target population, instead => MULTICULTURALISM
• Contemporary advertising campaigns have tried to re-invent the world the world in all its multicultural glories without threatening culturally-embedded hierarchies of the past
• 6 advertising campaigns: “Newsweek”, “Business week”, “Vogue”, “In Style”, “Premiere”, Entertainment Weekly” : issues from Sept.  1999 to Dec 2000 => noticeable changes on the number of ads showing As./Am models
• Males were rarely seen because Asian-Am. men anchors are nearly completely absent
•      Gender imbalance=> makes As./Am. women more desirable to be assimilated when paired with white men and reinforces “the ownership” of white am men over the bodies and spirits of As./Am. women
• A diversity of targeted As./Am. consumers – from lower to middle-range consumers, and recently to white-collar professional clientele, mainly bussinessmen.
• The ad of 2 women(the White and the As./Am.) reading books with different titles
• “Find Your Voice” campaign by Virginia Slims => different images of women from diverse racial backgrounds expressing to “find your voice” in life
• Despite the corporation’s attempts to address a multicultural audience, the cultural references in the ads end up perpetuating Orientalist meanings that reaffirm the dominant status of White Americans
• OFOTO, an online photography service by Kodak
• Their ad: an individual sitting on a chair, looking at an unseen picture of himself/herself with someone else. 4 different frames, each featuring models of different races(the white man, an older Af-Am. man, the white woman, and the As-Am. woman)
• Analysis: males have connection to their familiies and lineage, females do not. The Asian-Am. woman in the hotel in Prague, depcted as the erotic setting of foreign lands and forbidden pleasures.

 

Resistance Through Video Game Play: It’s a Boy Thing

Kathy Sanford and Leanna Madill

Background information:

Why play video games? – Because video game play serves as a form of resistance to stereotypical views of boys as a category of unsuccessful learners.

Boys and male youth are far more engaged in video game play than girls.

Boys and men play the same type of video games.

When video game play viewed as “text”, operational, cultural, and critical dimensions of literacy and learning analyzed. Operational literacy – includes but also goes beyond competence with tools, procedures, and techniques involved in being able to handle the written language system proficiency. Cultural literacy – knowing of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate way of reading and writing. Critical literacy – awareness that all social practices, and thus all literacies, are socially constructed and “selective.”

Thesis: to examine video games as a domain that many boys and men choose to resist traditional school-based literacy, and examine how they use games to resist controlling societal forces and so-called feminized spaces such as home, daycare, and school.

Method: 2 groups of participants. 1^st group: 6 young adolescent males attending school in small Canadian community. Throughout the year, observed them at school, interviewed twice. 2^nd group: 5 young adult males, they were observed and videotaped in their home environment while playing video games independently or with their friends, interviewed 2-3 times over 3 months. Both groups come from middle class white families.

Findings: 3 types of resistance: institutional authority, hegemonic masculinity, femininity.

Resistance to institutional authority – resistance to imposed rules of society; by playing they felt more able to resist, and relied on fellow players; for elder ones – “zone out”, relaxation; alternative way of learning – not based on textbook, or dull tasks (game – Civilization 3); alternative reality – “can fly with a jet pack, break into an airport, grab some pizza…you are not limited on what you can do”; also while playing some of them cheated, one dimension of resistance to rules.

Resistance to hegemonic masculinity – games enable them to experiment with their identity (character of girl can be chosen), and not undermining their real masculinity; challenge expectations of appropriate behavior/appearance; can play men of color/females that are opposed to hegemonic masculinity; or if the person does not fit into hegemonic masculinity in real life he can create alternative view of himself (muscular, brave); by paying gain operational literacy – how to use computer, programs etc.

Rejecting femininity – can create non-feminine, dangerous looking image; feminine typed characters are passive, need to be rescued. Hence, they choose masculine ones, as a result they differentiate males and females in sexual way. The same applies to avatars that players choose.

Glenn 2008 Yearning for Lightness

Colorism, preference for and privileging the lighter skin and discrimination against those with darker skin, remains persisting frontier of intergroup relationships in 21^st century.

People with darker skin are perceived as less intelligent, untrustworthy, and unattractive compared to their lighter skinned counterparts. Therefore skin color can be conceptualized as a form of symbolic capital that affects one’s life chances. Although, skin color is usually perceived as fixed, i.e. cannot be changed men and women might try to alter, i.e. try to lighten their skin color.

The focus of the article: the practice of skin lightening, the marketing of skin lightening products in different societies and multinational corporations that are involved in this trade. Author tries to examine closely how in Western-dominated global system “the white is right” ideology has been sustained.

Internet has become an important site from which one can gain a multilevel perspective on skin lightening. People all over the world explore and discuss about the ideal skin type, and multinational corporations use this tool to reach particular group of consumers through advertising on the internet.

Consumer groups and market niche:

• Southern Africa

In Southern Africa colorism is a negative consequence of European colonialism when being black was associated with primitiveness, lack of civilization, unrestrained sexuality, pollution, and dirt. Therefore, there is huge rise in consumption of skin lightening products, even though the import of such goods is prohibited due to health hazards. The research reveals that 25% of women traders in Bamaki (Mali), 35% in Pretoria (South Africa), 52% in Dakar (Senegal), and 77% in Lagos (Nigeria) use skin lightening products.

The companies that produce these products are located in Europe.

• African Americans

Colorism in American community is considered to be a negative consequence of slavery. The practice of the use of skin lightening products by African Americans dates back to 1850’s. It was revealed from discussions about skin color on African American forums that women want not white skin, but light like celebrities (Halle Berry or Beyonce). However, it is suggested that celebrities have lighter skin tone due to skillful use of cosmetics and artful lighting.

• India and Indian Diaspora

Origins of colorism come from colonialism. British were viewed as presenters of higher culture and optimum physical type. Light skinned people were viewed as more intelligent and attractive. Regardless colonialism, preference for light skin seems to be universal today. Young women between 16- 35 are main consumers of skin lightening products. Skin color is constitutes valuable symbolic capital in the marriage market as well. Women with fair skin are considered to be more feminine.

• South East Asia: Philippines

Due to being a colony of Spain and then of USA Philippines was particularly affected by Western culture and ideology. Due to intermarriages with Spanish colonialist and Chinese settlers the more fair skinned type of people emerged. In most of the cases they constitute elite of this country. Young women are main consumers of skin lightening products. They want to lighten not only their faces, but also elbows, knees, and underarms.

• East Asia: Japan, Korea, China

East Asian societies have historically idealized white skin. For instance, Japanese women wear “white face”  for ceremonies. However, the growth rate of skin lightening products is even higher in Korea and China. 18% of Japanese and Hong-Kongers, and 8% of Koreans use them daily or weekly.

• Latin America: Mexico and Mexican Diaspora

Skin color is a significant indicator of status in Latin American countries. Elite has remained overwhelmingly light skinned. Darker skinned family members are usually ridiculed and teased. Moving from rural are to city, marrying a light-skinned person, using skin lighteners are the ways by which Mexican people are trying to move to cosmopolitan urban identity.

• North America and Europe:

White women too tried to use skin lightening products. However, in 1920’s tanning became more popular, since it showed that women is able to travel and spend time on tropical resorts. However, from 1980’s the skin lightening product market has expanded due to huge demand from aging population that wanted to youthful skin.

 

L’Oreal, Shiseido, and Unilever are three major corporations involved in the production of skin lightening products.

Gender and the Body

Individual bodies, collective state interests: The case of Israeli combat soldiers

By Orna Sasson-Levy

 

THESIS AND MAIN IDEA: The primary question this article raises is how democratic societies, whose liberal values seem to contradict the coercive values of the military, persuade men to enlist and participate in fighting. The author argues that part of the answer lies in alternative interpretation of transformative bodily and emotional practices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Israeli combat soldiers, the author claims that the warrior’s bodily and emotional practices are constituted through two opposing discursive regimes: self-control and thrill. The nexus of these two themes promotes an individualized interpretation frame of militarized practices, which blurs the boundaries between choice and coercion, presents mandatory military service as a fulfilling self-actualization, and enables soldiers to ignore the political and moral meanings of their actions. Thus, the individualized body and emotion management of the combat soldier serves the symbolic and pragmatic interests of the state, as it reinforces the cooperation between hegemonic masculinity and Israeli militarism.

Background:

How do states convince young men to go to war?

• In some countries, though not as many as in the past, men enlist because of coercive state laws requiring mandatory conscription, which is the case in Israel.
• However, with the impact of globalization, the configuration of the modern nation-state is rapidly changing, and the link between citizen and state is taking on a new character, a consequence of which is changing mobilization rates.
• However, in spite of social and ideological changes, Israel’s Jewish community perceives the military as the emblem of pure patriotism and as one of the major symbols of the collective. In this militaristic culture, the (Jewish) combat soldier has achieved the status of hegemonic masculinity and is identified with good citizenship.

The aim in this article is to propose other, more subtle ways through which men are lured into fighting at a time when the link between the individual and the state is being transformed.

I argue that the construction of the Israeli combat soldier involves two seemingly opposing themes: on one hand, self-control, and on the other, thrill.

The theme of self-control is characterized by introversion, self-restraint, and self-repression, the theme of thrill accentuates the outward expression of wild, unrestrained feelings, stemming from life-endangering events, adventurous activities, and unique opportunities the military offers for intimacy among men. These interdependent themes accentuate a growing sense of agency and self-actualization, thus allowing, and even promoting, their interpretation through an individualistic frame.