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...
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... her like she is a child trying to discuss business at the adults’ table at dinner. Don’s childhood is not even his own, but more than that, he practices his dominance in their marriage by knowing all of Betty’s secrets but giving her nothing but bits and pieces. We see how Don’s limiting of emotional expression about himself damages Betty, leaving her anxious throughout the rest of their marriage. The only woman in Don’s life that he expresses any real and raw emotion for and in front of is the real Don Draper’s wife, Anna Draper, who takes Dick posing as her husband in after the incident during the Korean war. He becomes the mother figure Dick never had in his life, so when Anna dies sometime in the fourth season, Don finds himself finally letting himself have an raw emotional breakdown that has been building in front of another important woman in his life, Peggy.
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
Men do not have the benefits of equality either, they are also limited by societal expectations and having to fulfill the requirements of what it means to “be a man”. Gender roles shape the fabric of our society. In the documentary Tough Guise, Katz chronicles the socialization of boys from the moment they are born and as they grow up. Tough guise explains how the entertainment industry feeds messages about masculinity which exclude basic human qualities such as compassion, and vulnerability. These are portrayed as feminine with a negative connotation implied (Earp, Katz, Young and Rabinovitz 2013). In American modern culture children of both sexes are consuming large amounts of media on a daily basis. The documentary MissRepresentation explores the media’s role in the shaping of our society; specifically the media’s treatment of women. When it comes to girls and women, marketers have made substantial profits from objectifying women and setting an unattainable standard of what it means to be beautiful. Hyper-feminized women are all over the covers of magazines, hypersexualized in advertisements, and in movies. Women have to walk a very thin tightrope and the expectations for a good woman are contradicting (Newsom, Scully, Dreyfous, Redlich, Congdon, and Holland
In the United States, women are universally experiencing misogyny and pressure to conform to the ideals of hegemonic femininity. This experience for women is in part due to the acceptance of controlling images such as stereotypical gender roles and sexual objectification in the media and other broadcasting outlets. On the opposite side, men are also experiencing the stress and pressure of conforming to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. The media is thus creating a vicious cycle of rhetoric and images persuading men and women that they have to act, look, and live life a certain way. Within this vicious cycle, the commodification of difference is created to benefit mass media, marketing representatives, and the generally white, upper-class
In cotemporary America, cultural text such as films form many conceptions of race, gender and social for the people who watch them. This paper argues four Key and Peele skits “Substitute Teacher”, “I Said B*tch”, “Phone Call” and “Proud Thug” to challenge and complicate gender norms by highlighting the ways in which gender, race and class are performed in public and private settings. When you critically examine these texts there are stereotypes that underlay the film that are obvious, but are portrayed as comical. The intersectionality between gender, race and class are often addressed in many of these short skits. Often the films or skits engage in patriarchy and the main characters are men. In order to further examine the topic first we must address intersecionality, patriarchy, poverty, and class to grasp a better understanding.
According to Poverty & Prejudice: Media and Race, co-authored by Yurii Horton, Raagen Price, and Eric Brown, the media sets the tone for the morals, values and images of our culture. Many whites in American society, some of whom have never encoun...
Historically, the representation of gay, African-American men on television has fallen short of the mark . We have seen “sissies, faggots and finger-snapping queens” sashaying across the screen, feminizing and marginalizing African-American men by these racially insensitive and homophobic caricatures. In this paper I examine the characters: Keith Charles of HBO’s Six Feet Under, Omar Little of HBO’s The Wire, Lafayette Reynolds of HBO’s True Blood, and Julien Lowe of FX’s The Shield and how their characters manifest their masculinity. The three characters that appear on HBO shows are portrayed as strong, masculine, openly gay men. Only Lowe, the sole African-American gay man who has appeared on a basic cable hour-long television drama is a closeted gay character. Since the “out” characters appear on HBO and the closeted character appears on basic cable, is it possible that an audience who can afford to pay for HBO is tolerant of the representation of masculine gay men while an audience watching on basic cable is not tolerant of that representation? Or is HBO’s marketing campaign, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” an experimentation with “genre, coupled with their strategy of distancing themselves from broadcast television culminating in a distinguishable brand name and a noticeable schism between pay cable and broadcast television” (Jaramillo 60). Or rather, is the HBO audience one that is able to pay for a subscription to HBO, just gazing at these characters? Are these characters just a twist on the “big black buck” stereotype for a post-modern audience – one comfortable with explorations of masculine, racialized, gay desire? HBO’s marketing certainly attempts to position itself as a step above broadcast TV, airing programming that is de...
Dines, Gail, and Jean McMahon Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Print.
For decades now, popular culture has been tainted by the perpetual use of racial stereotypes that come to us through music, television, and film. These reactionary stereotypes are often unaddressed and often permeate the minds of those too young to understand what a stereotype is. Therefore the effects of these conventionalized ideas continue to prevail throughout our society as they are repeatedly swept under the rug. However, although seemingly less common, there are also forms of media with goals of bringing attention to toxic stereotypes while still entertaining their audiences. African-Americans, Arabs, and Latin@’s are three of the most prevalent minority groups represented in the media and by analyzing the films Aladdin, Django Unchained, and the television show Devious Maids, one can become much more aware of the racial stereotypes that they are calling attention to.
It is irrefutable that media alters societal perceptions. As an audience, we are constantly being exposed to messages that influence us in minute and massive ways. With ever evolving technology, the exposure to concepts will only increase as the availability of these messages increases. The clips collected in the assignment demonstrate different aspects of masculinity from television shows: stereotypical masculinity in Parks and Recreation, Toxic Masculinity in Jersey Shore, and the fragility of masculinity in Shark Tank.
Since television came into existence, it has evolved into a useful tool to spread ideas, both social and political, and has had a great effect on the generations growing up with these heavily influential shows. To these younger generations, television has taken the role of a teacher, with the task of creating a social construction by which many of us base our personal beliefs and judgments on. This power allows television shows take the opportunity to address problems in a manner that many audiences can take to heart. Many television shows present controversial topics in a comical matter, in some ways to soften the blow of hard-hitting reality at the same time bringing attention to the issue being addressed. In the television show, Everybody Hates Chris, season one, episode four entitled “Everybody Hates Sausage”, the stereotypes that continue to fuel racism are examined in a satirical motif, and class is presented in a comical way, but carries serious undertones which present a somewhat realistic view of the different social strata within the United States.
The average America watches more than 150 hours of television every month, or about five hours each day (“Americans,” 2009). Of the 25 top-rated shows for the week of February 8-14, 2010, six were sitcoms, averaging 5.84 million live viewers each (Seidman, 2010), to say nothing for the millions more who watched later on the Internet or their Digital Video Recorders. The modern sitcom is an undeniable force in America, and its influence extends beyond giving viewers new jokes to repeat at the water cooler the next day: whether Americans realize it or not, the media continues to socialize them, even as adults. It may appear at first glance that sitcoms are a relatively benign force in entertainment. However, the modern sitcom is more than just a compilation of one-liners and running gags. It is an agent of gender socialization, reinforcing age-old stereotypes and sending concrete messages about how, and who, to be. While in reality, people of both sexes have myriad personality traits that do not fall neatly along gender lines, the sitcom spurns this diversity in favor of representing the same characters again and again: sex-crazed, domestically incompetent single men enjoying their lives as wild bachelors, and neurotic, lonely, and insecure single women pining desperately to settle down with Prince Charming and have babies. Sitcoms reinforce our ideas about what it is “normal” to be, and perhaps more importantly feed us inaccurate ideas about the opposite sex: that women are marriage-crazed, high-maintenance, and obsessed with the ticking of their biological clocks, while men are hapless sex addicts whose motives can’t be trusted. The way that singles are portrayed in sitcoms is harmful to viewers’ understanding of themselves...
One of the greatest exports of American culture is American media. American media is one of the most widely distributed and consumed cultural forms from the United States. This means that not only do Americans consume large quantities of their own media, but many other countries in the world consume American media, too. People in other countries will not interpret or understand the media in precisely the same ways that Americans will and do, nonetheless, many aspects of American culture and American reality are communicated to numerous viewers as part of the content in the media. The media is an important tool in the discussion of race, class, and gender in America. It takes a savvy viewer to discriminate between and understand what media accurately represents reality, what media does not, or which aspects of experience are fictionalized, and which elements ...
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.
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...
Mar, Tyler, Tyler Mar, and View profile. "Typed Into Our Heads: Gender Inequality In Media". Tylermar.blogspot.com. N. p., 2015. Web. 18 Apr. 2016