Gender and Mass Media: Representation of Women's Images in Television Commercials
Introduction:
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ukraine is undergoing complex and lengthy political, economic, and social transformations related to a gradual change from an administrative and command model to a democratic model of society, including the construction of civil society. Such transformations are accompanied by the necessity to create a democratic culture of society and its integral part-gender culture. A powerful tool to create and communicate gender democracy and gender culture of society are media-technologies which have become an integral part of people's everyday lives and part of Ukrainian culture. Mass media are able to legitimate gender ideas and notions shaped by gender politics and ideology, and to increase the probability of their reception by audiences. The efficacy of gender culture formation depends both on state gender politics and on gender strategies and ideology of mass media and the images presented by them.
The importance of this module is defined by a necessity to re-think gender aspects of mass media in Ukraine and, in particular, of TV commercials as one of the most effective tools of gender construction and socialization. A review of Ukrainian advertisement context (1990-2004) through the lens of gender permits us to observe gender culture of the society during the past 14 years and evaluate its dynamics. A comparative analysis of American and Ukrainian TV (commercial) contexts presents common and distinctive traits in gender culture and politics of both countries.
Target audience:
Masters level students of journalism, sociology and other social science fields, as well as journalists who are interested in gender research.
Academic Aims:
To reveal the role of TV commercials in creation of gender stereotypes, to develop analytical skills for deconstructing the gendered nature of TV commercials, and to expose sexism in TV commercials.
Learning objectives:
1. Students/practitioners will understand how gender stereotypes are presented in TV commercials.
2. Students/practitioners will be able to analyze TV commercials using a gender approach.
3. Students/practitioners will develop a gender tolerant attitude and gender sensitive approach regarding women's images presented by commercials in Ukrainian TV space (national, regional, and cable).
Key questions for the module:
1. What do women's images presented by commercials within Ukrainian TV space communicate to the audience about a woman's role at home, at work, in political and social life?
2. In what ways are images of women's appearance and self-representation presented in commercials within Ukrainian TV space?
3. How do contemporary images in TV commercials reflect traditional women's images in Ukrainian society?
4. How have women's images presented by commercials within Ukrainian TV space changed during the past decade due to transformational processes within Ukrainian society ?
Module requirements: independent study of the recommended literature, participation in discussions, application of content-analysis and «media-mirror» method to the research of Ukrainian informational society within module topic.
Key concepts:
Androcentrism is a deep-rooted cultural tradition, which reduces common human subjectivity/subjectivities to a single man's norm represented as universal objectivity, meanwhile other subjectivities and, first of all, woman's, are represented as deviation and marginality. Androcentrism is not simply a perspective on the world from man's point of view, but passing off man's normative conceptions and life models for general universal social norms and life models.
Gender is a concept which defines social gender of a person as opposite to his/her biological sex. Gender presents a social role status, which defines social opportunities in education, professional sphere, and access to power, family roles, and reproductive behaviour.
Gender democracy is a system of expression of will of two genders-women and men in the civil society as equals in opportunities and rights fixed by law and provided by political and legal principles, actions, and the creation of social and state structures which take into consideration gender interests and needs.
Gender differentiation is defined as a process within which biological differences between men and women are given a social meaning and used as means of social classification.
Gender identity is a basic structure of social identity, which characterizes a person (an individual) according to her/his belonging to female or male group; the most important is how the person categorizes herself/himself.
Gender culture is a combination of gender role values in social spheres of being and needs, interests, and forms of activities corresponding to them; it is defined by the institutions of society connected with the activities.
Gender politics is how the genders define and realize political goals, tasks, and methods of their achievement within activities of political structures-state, political parties, and social and political organizations.
Gender equity is a process of development of a just attitude toward and treatment of women and men. To provide justice, criteria have to be developed to compensate historical and social obstacles, which hamper men and women to exist under equal conditions. Justice leads to equal rights.
Gender equality is an equal evaluation of women and men by society.
Gender role is a type of a social role, a set of expected patterns of behaviour (or norms) for women and men. Gender role is understood as execution of certain social prescriptions, i.e. corresponding behaviour to a certain gender expressed by speech, manners, cloths, gestures, etc.
Gender strategies define socially meaningful gender trends in activities and their organizational structures, directed to establish gender democracy in the society for development of gender culture.
Gender stratification is a process by which gender becomes a foundation for ranking people in a social stratification system.
Gender stereotypes are common concepts (beliefs) formed in culture about how actual men and women behave. The term should not be confused with the concept of "gender role" which means a set of expected behavior patterns (or norms) for women and men. The appearance of gender stereotypes is a result of historical construction of a gender relations model where gender differences were situated above individual, qualitative differences of personality of man or woman.
Masculinity presents a system of attitudes, characteristics of behavior, opportunities/possibilities and expectations, which determine social practice of a group unified by the category of male gender. In other Words, masculinity is that which is added to anatomy to obtain a man's role.
Sexism is an ideology and practice of discrimination against people on basis of their gender. It is based on sets and beliefs according to which women (or men) are falsely prescribed (or denied) certain qualities.
Feminism is a theory and practice of gender equity/equality developed on the basis of women's movements for emancipation. Often it is interpreted more broadly as various activities directed to protect women's rights based on ideas about legal gender equality. Feminism appeared as an acknowledgement of the fact that there is injustice in social evaluation of women.
Femininity consists of characteristics related to woman's gender or typical forms of behavior expected from a woman in the society. It was traditionally assumed that femininity is biologically predetermined, and it prescribed such traits as passivity, responsiveness, softness, desire of motherhood, attentiveness, emotionality, etc. These ideas corresponded to women's belonging to domestic/private, non-public sphere.
Session 1
Introduction to gender (See also Introduction to Gender Studies module)
Definition of key notions: gender, sex, gender role, gender identity, gender differentiation, gender stratification, gender socialization, gender stereotypes, femininity, masculinity, androcentrism, patriarchy, and feminism. Also, discussion of sociology of gender, as a subject and object of studies, and a problematic field in Ukrainian society.
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