“Critical Theory is a theory seeking emancipation and change in a dominant social order” (Baran & Davis, 2012). Critical theory is a social theory that deals with different aspects of society. It tends to critique cultures that include: media, advertising and consumer culture. Moreover, Critical theory is also used to study how education is dealt with using information technology and it also concentrates on social relationships that are social, political and economic. The critical theory is known to be one of the theories that have been defined in different ways by different theorists depending on how they understood the theory. This paper will mainly discuss the literature review of the Critical theory and how it can be applied to television. To be precise I will focus on analyzing or criticizing feminism in a television series known as “Sex and the City”. I chose to criticize feminism on a television series because I believe that this is a serious issue that is being debated all around the world today.
The origins of the Critical Theory trace back to one of the first schools of thought known as the Frankfurt School founded in Germany in 1923 by a group of neo-Marxist theorists, which include Max Horkeimer, Herbert Marcuse and Lowenthal Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Leo Lowenthal; these were some of the leading members of the institute and they were also the first generation of theorist. (Kellner, 1992), and one of the major contributors of this institute is Felix Weil; he was a German Marxist who was determined to introduce Marxist studies in Germany and his donations to the Frankfurt School of thought were very helpful in establishing the institute. A background in Marxist philosophy helped the Fran...
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Geuss, R.(1981). The idea of critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Hermes, J. (2002). Television and its Viewers in Post-Feminist Dialogue Internet- mediated Response to “Ally McBeal” and “Sex and the City”. Stichting Etnofoor. 15(1/2) 194-211
Hoy, D. & McCarthy, T. (1995). Critical Theory. American Philosophical Association. 68(3) 88-89
Horkheimer, M., 1982. Critical Theory, New York: Seabury Press.
Kellner, D. (1992) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
L. R. Broster (1941). Feminism. The British Medical Journal. 1(4177) 117-118
Short, S. E., Claire Yang, Y., Y., & Jerkinds, T. M. (2013). Sex, Gender, Genetics, and Health. American Journal of Public Health, 103(S1), S93-S101.
Tallack, D. (1995). Critical theory A reader. Maylands: Harvester Wheatsehaf.
This essay will discuss how national attitudes towards the working-class and the impoverished are represented in American Television. The purpose of this paper is to comprehend that television shows are not solely designed to entertain consumers but also contain a hidden agenda whose task is to protect certain ideological perspectives and therefore constant framing strategies take place. The paper will commence the analysis by discussing how males and females are represented in the television show Friday Night Lights, secondly it will look at the
Michael Abernathy’s article “Male Bashing on TV” uses many television sources and percentages to explain how men are treated like idiots inside of the media. Abernathy is a television reviewer, cultural critic, and queer culture commentator (350). While Heather Havrilesky's article “TV’s New Wave of Women:Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane” is the opposite and uses television sources to explain how women are treated as smart yet crazy inside of the media. These two articles describe how men and women are portrayed differently in television shows and the media. The articles have smaller subtopics in common which are the portrayal of men and women in the media, the comparison of men and women in each article, and how Abernathy and Havrilesky want
Instead, women are being discriminated and treated as inferior due to the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media. The media creates and reproduces ways of seeing that at a minimum reflect and shape our culture. We can look at the media to understand more about a culture’s values and norms, if we realize the limitations of looking at the media. For example, one may ask, does the news based in the United Sates represent what the American culture is like, or only what stands out from everyday American culture? The answer to that is no. Instead, the media represents what it thinks it will be able to sell and is supported by advertisements. This includes violent acts, the sensationally and inappropriate. Jhally reminds us that “it is this male, heterosexual, pornographic imagination based on the degradation and control of women that has colonized commercial culture in general, although it is more clearly articulated in music videos” (Jhally 2007). Therefore, “media content is a symbolic rather than a literal representation of society and that to be represented in the media is in itself a form of power—social groups that are powerless can be relatively easily ignored, allowing the media to focus on the social groups that ‘really matter’” (Gerbner,
Since its inception, American mass media and entertainment has had an indelible impression on how our culture develops our collective identity. Mass media’s grip on cultural perspective has unprecedented power in molding how society communicates, why we communicate and what the communication ultimately means in our everyday lives. Say what you will about television, but what has been made excruciatingly clear over the past few decades is that the small screen is a teacher and what it teaches us more than anything is our roles in civility. Representation is key in this respect. Generally, much of television is concerns heterosexual, white males and their constituents, most of which are too white, heterosexual and male. In the age of being able to access television shows with a few clicks of one’s phone or computer, media’s presence continues to envelope the lives and perspectives of everyone. Young people who are growing up with new technologies that beam copious amounts of mass media influencers by the second are especially affected--their identities become cookie-cut before they even enter kindergarten. The AMC drama series, Mad Men is a marvel that has won four consecutive Emmy-awards for Best Drama Series and continues to receive glowing reviews every season. The wildly popular and critically-acclaimed television drama series expresses every concerning aspect of media’s representation of “US”, our history, our ideals and beliefs. What is perhaps most interesting about this award-winning show is how it always generates a dialogue about the state of our current cultural identity, saying so much about the nature of gender roles, sexuality, race and more. It is a reminder that whilst we are being entertained, we are also having our...
Lambert, E. G., Paoline III, E. A., Hogan, N. L., & Baker, D. N. (2007). Gender
John Steinbeck once stated, “It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and to hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams, for the purpose of improvement.” In others words, people should expose the many flaws and failures that every human has. By revealing them and making it eye-catching, that person can recognize that flaw and work to improve their flaws and failures. The journalistic novel Random Family by Adriene Nicole LeBlanc and the non-fiction novel Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger both reveal that true mental and emotional freedom is dependent on finding a solution for your defects and deficiency. The literary elements used to prove this quote was conflict and irony.
In the book “self – taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom”, the author, Heather Andrea Williams, does a great job telling the story of the obstacles slaves faced in their attempts to become educated. Throughout the book, Williams gives numerous accounts of the experiences of these slaves and illustrates their determination to learn to read and write; as well as obtain a formal education. In my opinion, the most common theme that resonates with me after reading chapters one through nine is persistence; despite challenges, obstacles, punishment, and death, slaves were determined to become educated.
It is increasingly clear that media and culture today are of central importance to the maintenance and reproduction of contemporary societies. Cultures expose society to different personalities, provide models, which display various forms of societal life and cultivate various ways to introduce people into dominant forms of thought and action. These are the types of activities integrate people into society and create our public sphere. Media and technology surround our society; engrained into the fabric of our existence so much so, that it has become hard to find an aspect of life not influenced by its effects. For this reason, media controllers, wield extreme power and influence over the lives of everyday people. Although, they increasingly continue to feed the audience trash, despite their authority as the creator of our social/cultural interactions, and justify their actions by calling themselves industries. Reducing themselves to just businesses whose sole purpose is to create a profit. This admittance of what they feel to be their true purpose however does not hinder their control and power but instead adds to it. Creating a need for there to be some way to analyze and discuss whether they are using their position and power wisely. Filling this void, scholars have theorized ways for individuals to be critical of the media that they intake. One of these critical theories is the “Culture Industry” theory. Using Cultural Theory, as well as other complementary neo Marxist theories, it is possible to determine how Stacy Peralta, once urban youth culture advocate, became incorporated into the superstructure through media use, thus making him a tool for the continued commoditization of society, and a youth marketer for industries l...
Today, love, sex and romance are three main topics that presented in media as main themes discuss in contemporary popular culture. Social media is important in shaping audience value about feminism through the framework of contemporary media like films, magazines, plays, advertisements, TV shows, graphic novels, etc. The television show “Sex and the City” incorporates “pop feminism” that influences many lives of women. Sex and the City is originally talking about four single thirty-something women living in Manhattan. They are coming to New York in order to seek “love and labels” (Sex and the City). The main theme of Sex and the City is concentrating on contemporary American woman’s conception of sex, love, and romance. As we learned from lecture, sex, love, and romance have a history; they are different in different cultures; they are shaped by gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation, ability, and other differences (Lecture Notes). Sex and the City is focusing on modern American woman’s experiences and their thinks with sex, love, and romance. The four main women characters in Sex and the City represent diversity of gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, age, able-bodiedness through their different experience and expectations of their life (Lecture Notes). Sex and the City represents that the feminism notions of sex, love, and romance are socially constructed, and this social construction of sex, love and romance are featured in these female characters’ personalities.
Tyson, Lois. "Marxist Criticism." Critical Theory Today: A User-friendly Guide. New York: Garland Pub., 1999. 52-64. Print.
The media, through its many outlets, has a lasting effect on the values and social structure evident in modern day society. Television, in particular, has the ability to influence the social structure of society with its subjective content. As Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P. Hébert write in their article, “GENDER, RACE, AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION”, the basis of our accepted social identities is heavily controlled by the media we consume. One of the social identities that is heavily influenced is gender: Brooks and Hébert conclude, “While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture” (Brooks, Hébert 297). With gender being shaped so profusely by our culture, it is important to be aware of how social identities, such as gender, are being constructed in the media.
According to D Gauntlett (2008), Media and communications are a central element of modern life, whilst gender and sexuality remain at the core of how we think about our identities. In modern societies, people spend more hours for watching television, look...
One of the popular theory of the “Critical Theorist “ ( with referrence to the Marxist view ).
Throughout the 21st century we have been immersed in a world in which is almost wholly dominated by the media. It is appropriate to say that many ideologies have been indeed challenged by the media, including the ideology of feminism, which I aim to focus on in this essay. Firstly, it is necessary to think about what the founding concepts of feminism actually are and how the ideologies of post feminism and antifeminism are using the contemporary media to question feminism. Texts such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and Desperate Housewives are fitting examples of how post feminism has penetrated through the media challenging feminism. Similarly elements of anti-feminism are evident when looking at films such as the new adaptation of Cinderella .
How mass media is using both Ideology and Popular Culture to develop societal expectations and social identities. This essay will look at how Ideology, Hegemony, and Popular Cultural Theory shape common values and expectations of society and media’s influence and compare and contrast differing approaches to understanding the relationship between media and society. The discussion will be contextualized through the use of gender roles and expectations, and how these theories develop and affect the female social identity.