Academic literature on the topic 'Women and Media'

Why are women attracted to join women-only online communities and what are the affordances of these communities? This study is focusing on the signifier of the fourth-wave feminism – feminist activity online and the cultivation of online safe spaces. Sweden is often considered to be a gender-equal country but this study sheds light on the fact that women in Sweden still experience gender inequalities. Through interviews with members of the online community Heja Livet, this study aims to investigate why women choose to join women-only online communities, how they reflect on separatism and safe spaces, and the group’s possible contributions to women and society at large. The study is based on a feminist perspective and has a constructionist approach in the sense that it understands the individual members’ perceptions as constructions. The study found that the administrative work, a constant renegotiation of the binaries safe/unsafe and inclusion/exclusion together with the separation from men, creates a climate where women feel comfortable to interact with other women online. Issues of whether Heja Livet is inclusive of all women remain under discussion, and even though the members consider separatist groups to be important for both individual women and the feminist movement, it is also important to raise men’s consciousness of patriarchal structures. Heja Livet provides a space where women can come together with other women to discuss, share, support, find inspiration, empower each other and raise consciousness. It is difficult to determine whether the group can be defined as a safe space or not, both due to the incomplete and dynamic nature of safe spaces and also because of the interviewees’ low level of active participation exposing themselves and their personal life in the group. The perceptions of the interviewees were, however, that the group provides women with a safe space online.

To establish how women are portrayed in the press, the dissertation offers findings from a content analysis of 1,050 news accounts of women drawn from three Zambian newspapers in 1991, 1995 and 1999. These findings are supported by a textual reading of a smaller number of news accounts examining how media construct women in politics as they are representatives of other women in general. The dissertation concludes that news accounts of women in the Zambian press to some extent contribute to their continued marginalisation in society

Muslim women are misrepresented through frames and stereotypes that the media uses to further an established narrative. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analyzes three liberal-nonpartisan Italian newspapers and their approach towards two themes, which are the burkini debate that occurred in late August 2016 and the analysis of three different Muslim women within the Italian society. The study concludes that Muslim women are negatively framed through the usage of a discourse that stereotypes them and constructively misrepresents their reality.

The media have power: they create frames of conceptions, influence attitudes and behaviour, and monitor the conduct of government officials. For women, the media can suggest ways and means to defend civil rights and gain access to society’s resources and opportunities. Indeed, Media Development offers three levels of interventions to promote gender equality. (1) Increasing female number and roles in the media labour markets. (2) Promoting the production and circulation of content that challenge stereotypical portrayals of women and men. (3) Addressing the entire society to raise awareness and commitment for equal contributions in sustainable development. However, even though media development efforts have been popular during the last two decades in the global South (UNESCO), the Arab region is ranked the lowest in the world for achieving gender equality (CRS, 2020).  This project aims to investigate the role of media development to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through a case study of two gender strategies driven by two main models of media development (Scott, 2014; Manyozo, 2012), in the Arab region. One is led by external interventions, the other is supported by domestic authorities and local governments. The time period of the research is limited to the last decade, which has seen radical changes in terms of women’s participation in the public sphere.  The findings are based on 10 in-depth interviews with media professionals directly involved in these strategies across different Arab countries, from Algeria, Iraq, and Palestine, to the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Despite the differences between the strategies in terms of political affiliations and territories of interest, the interviews show that gender (in)equality in the media is not a phenomenon isolated from people’s daily lives. Correspondingly, women’s empowerment is the result of different power struggles in society in which media development could potentially make a real difference if based on gendered pluralistic participatory approaches, which include the internal and external environments of media organisations, as well as all actors of society’s systems and structures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-372). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Women have historically been the subject of stereotypes – especially criminalized women as they are constructed in the mass media. These stereotypes become particularly problematic when they are invoked in infotainment media – a genre that combines information and entertainment and presents itself as primarily factual. As such, ideological messages delivered through infotainment are also (re)presented as truthful and may be more likely to be taken up by an unquestioning audience. This research aimed to answer the following research question: How does infotainment portray women who commit serious violent crime? In order to answer this question, a qualitative content analysis was employed and “Deadly Women”, a televised infotainment series that narrates and re-enacts true crime stories of women who kill, was selected as a case study. The sample consisted of previously identified typologies: mothers who kill their children, women who kill their partners, adolescent girls who kill, and vigilantes who kill their abusers. Stemming from a critical feminist framework, the analysis revealed that Deadly Women relies on two primary trajectories to explain the violence committed by women and girls. While both trajectories emphasized gendered stereotypes that involved emotionality and mental health issues, they were nonetheless distinct. The first trajectory evoked narratives of the ‘emotionless’ and ‘psychopathic’ perpetrator; while the second trajectory characterized the offender as overly ‘emotional’ and ‘depressed’. These trajectories, along with their related variables, problematically (re)presented violent women and girls in simplistic and dualistic manners that served to obscure rather than to clarify the circumstances surrounding their crimes.

In this research I employ a feminist and qualitative approach, challenging the predominant psychological discourse of pornography. I discuss the ways law, history and economics influence how women relate to pornography. A range of theoretical approaches, including psychoanalysis, film theory and cultural studies, are used to explore pornographic texts and women's accounts of their engagement with pornography. Drawing on these different disciplinary frameworks I argue that the meanings of `pornography' are changing and elusive: its insusceptibility to easy definition is a theme of this research, which takes into consideration diverse media, including erotic fiction and women's magazines. Feminist theory and discourse analysis informs the analysis of 34 interview transcripts, and leads to reflection on research-related problems such as questions of ethics, researching the `other', and tensions between feminisms and psychology. Women negotiate the heterosexist and masculine discourse of pornography in unexpected ways, and anti-porn feminism is shown to have shaped participants' views and impacted on their identities. The ways in which individual psychic histories and sociocultural constructions such as `race', `class', and sexual orientation enter into women's viewing of porn are explored. Psychoanalytic and gaze theories are drawn upon to offer insight into the different psychic mechanisms and positions involved in viewing and reading pornography. Pornography is a factor in the social construction of sexuality, but women's accounts (unlike much of the theory) show how their views, experiences and feelings about pornography are variegated, individual and complex. I argue for a Foucauldian perspective on the question of sexual repression and the effect-'of categorisations (such as `paedophile' and `sadomasochist'). The effects of new media and technologies are wide ranging, and include increasing opportunities for sex without physical contact, access to sex educational material, and the creation of multiple meanings of pornography for women. This thesis concludes by su gesting that the proliferation of new sexual discourses, including gay, lesbian and bisexual pornographies, has transgressive, contradictory and complex implications for women's sexualities.