“01 Unit 5: Construction of Meaning: Interpretation”
MODULE 1 UNIT 5
Construction of Meaning: Interpretation
Polysemic, Dominant, and Oppositional Readings
Goal: To identify the various interpretive stances taken toward media texts.
As the earlier unit on semiotics makes clear, symbols and signs can have multiple denotative and connotative meanings. The meaning an author or creator intends may not be what an audience interprets, and different audiences may interpret a text in different ways. Or audiences may interpret a text to denotatively mean the same thing, but have very different attitudes toward the text. As you might expect, ideology influences interpretations.
To explain these differences in interpretation, scholars have introduced the terms polysemy and polyvalence and identified three general categories of interpretation: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional.
Polysemy and Polyvalence
Although theories of hegemony might make you think all audiences interpret media texts in a singular, dictated way, media scholar John Fiske, in his influential book Television Culture, identified how different audiences can interpret mediated texts’ meanings in different and multiple ways.[1] As your own experience arguing with friends about a movie, or music, or a YouTube video might illustrate, not everyone interprets and evaluates a mediated message in the same way.
Think back to the semiotics unit. Where do signs get their meaning from? Meaning does not reside in the sign or symbol itself, but instead in the interplay between symbols and between symbols and audiences. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture,[2] noted the symbolic meaning of an image “is not in the visual sign itself as a self-sufficient entity, nor exclusively in the sociological positions and identities of the audience, but in the articulation between viewer and viewed, between the power of the image to signify and the viewer’s capacity to interpret meaning.”[3] Meaning exists in relationships, and ideology structures relationships and how people identify relationships between things in the world. Given the fluidity of meaning, it makes sense that meaning can be variable and fluid. It also means that to be a media critic, you need to develop the skill to identify the range of interpretations of a mediated message and where those meanings come from.
Fiske noted that audiences are not just passive recipients but actively and creatively engage with media. Fiske believed “a variety of readings”[4] are possible because media messages are polysemous (poly meaning many and sem referring to sign or symbol, as in semiotics), with multiple meanings attached to them. This does not mean meaning is completely open, however, as a polysemic text “is not anarchically open so that any meaning can be derived from it.”[5]
As an example, consider a cigarette. If you see a character smoking a cigarette in a film, what does this symbolize? You might interpret the cigarette to mean the film is set in an older time, when smoking was more socially acceptable. You might think the cigarette symbolizes class, either lower or higher. You might think the cigarette symbolizes gender, depending on how the person smoking holds the cigarette. The cigarette can denote different things. But, it’s very likely that the cigarette doesn’t symbolize a refrigerator or a squirrel.
In summarizing the research on polysemy, rhetoric scholar Leah Ceccarelli refined Fiske’s definition to make clear polysemy refers to “a bounded multiplicity, a circumscribed opening of the text in which we acknowledge diverse but finite meanings.”[6] Here, the multiplicity refers to “the existence of determinate but nonsingular denotational meanings.”[7]
The idea of polyvalence refers to a range of connotational meanings.[8] Communication scholar Celeste Condit developed the idea of polyvalence because they recognized that sometimes “audience members share understandings of the denotations of a text but disagree about the valuation of these denotations to such a degree that they produce notably different interpretations.”[9] The example of the cigarette can also illustrate polyvalence. When you see a cigarette in a film, do you have a positive or negative reaction? Does smoking a cigarette imply something positive or negative about the person smoking? As another example, two people may watch the same television episode, understand the plot in the same way (denotation) but have very different reactions to the story, thinking the lead character was heroic or was weak (connotation).
ACTIVITYPolyvalence and polysemy Have you been in a situation–with roommates or family members–where there were multiple ways to read a situation? Could you identify a range of interpretations (polyvalent)? As a class, pick a recent TV series ( like The Bachelor) popular sporting event, or a recent film that everyone is familiar with. Identify polysemic and polyvalent readings of this media text. |
Dominant, negotiated, and oppositional interpretations of media texts
Communication scholar Celeste Condit reminded that "[a]udiences are not free to make meanings at will from mass mediated texts" because "the ability of audiences to shape their own readings . . . is constrained by a variety of factors" including "access to oppositional codes . . . the repertoire of available texts" and the historical context.[10] This is why media critic Stuart Hall identified three broad ways of interpreting media texts: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional.[11]
One way to think about this trivium is that dominant readings are hegemonic; oppositional readings are counter-hegemonic; and blended readings are a mix of the two. The polysemy and polyvalence of texts are what allows multiple interpretive possibilities. The goal of this Handbook is to give you the tools to shape your own readings and identify the ideological work being done in mediated texts. We hope to equip you with vocabulary, knowledge, and critical tools that enable you to become media literate.
Dominant (or preferred)
Hegemonic ideologies are embedded in the symbols people use and the stories they tell, in movies, advertisements, news stories, novels, social media posts, memes, and episodic shows. When a reader (or viewer) takes the "connoted meaning from . . . a television newscast . . . full and straight . . . we might say that the viewer is operating inside the dominant code."[12] The viewer does not challenge the ideology behind the newscast or the way in which it maintains hegemonic power. For example, the viewer takes the newscast's report on the rising stock market as good news, accepting the connotative meaning that what is good for Wall Street is good for everyone. Dominant interpretations participate in the “of course” of ideology.
Sometimes, though, the encoded dominant meaning might not be so straightforward. Ceccarelli explained that sometimes authors create “strategic ambiguity” when they create texts that are open to interpretation because they are trying to navigate between two or more groups and so want to leave multiple interpretations possible.[13] For example, Ralina L. Joseph, in Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity[14] analyzed numerous examples of conversations among Black women media figures when they walk the tightrope between calling out racism overtly (and being dismissed as angry or racist themselves) or talking about racism in code.
One example is at the live broadcast of the 2016 Oscars red carpet, during which Robin Roberts interviewed Kerry Washington.
As Joseph explained,
Two glamorous Black women celebrities, replete in sleeveless floor-length gowns, dipped their toes into the topic of the day, #OscarsSoWhite. While the hashtag swirled across social media to critique the total absence of actors of color on the award list, Washington spoke without ever naming race, or using the words ‘Black’ or ‘White’.[15]
Because Washington talked about race without ever overtly or explicitly naming race or races, she strategically left open interpretations by being ambiguous.
Negotiated
When engaging in a negotiated reading, the viewer accepts some of the hegemonic meanings, but also recognizes some exceptions.[16] Here the denotational meanings are understood, but some of the connotational meanings are challenged. In this case, the viewer might take the rising stock market as good news, but might also realize that it is good news mainly for corporate executives and those with large stock holdings.
Oppositional or Resistive
In an oppositional reading, the viewer decodes the denotational and connotational meanings of a text in the way intended by the creator, but challenges it from an oppositional perspective. This viewer might understand the rising stock market as it relates to corporate cost-cutting; that is, this viewer decodes "good news" on Wall Street as bad news for the thousands who lost their jobs because production was outsourced to low-wage nations.
Ceccarelli likewise notes that oppositional or “resistive readings” occur when audiences rebel against authorial intent.[17] Although resistive readings are possible, they are not automatic or easy and require careful orchestration and choreography to make sure others see the text in the resistant way you intend. In other words, there are lots of powerful media and other forces pushing us toward a hegemonic reading. Without training and work, and sometimes the distance of time and knowledge of history, oppositional/resistive readings are unlikely.
ACTIVITYDominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings Choose a media text, and identify a dominant, negotiated, or oppositional reading to this text. Bonus: identify a few more resistive readings. Here is an example to get you thinking: In their oppositional/resistive reading of lynching photos, the editors of Without Sanctuary used them to show the complicity and violence of the white crowds, including families and children, smiling happily in the background. Without Sanctuary used the images to protest anti-Black violence, not celebrate it. Without Sanctuary motivated Senators Mary Landrieu and George Allan to propose a non-binding resolution in which the Senate formally apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation between 1890 and 1952.[19] Landrieu noted how the book “showed the real faces of lynching, and the images . . . unveiled began to change the way people viewed these tragic events.”[20] The book directed the gaze and viewing practices of audiences, showing them how to participate in a resistive reading. What is a resistive reading that you have participated in? |
Dominant readings as common sense: The story of the Marlboro Man
The dominant storytellers in society include major corporations, which tell stories that are beneficial to them through public relations and advertisements. Even short television commercials function as 30- and 60-second stories about how their products or services fit into the social order and solve problems in people's (characterized as consumers) lives; ads tap into broader cultural myths. Through repetition, these advertisements tell the same stories over and over, attempting to make their common appearances into common sense.
The history of cigarette advertising illustrates this. As a little background, consider that the smoking of cigarettes was quite rare until the end of the 1800s because they were considered a luxury. But, with automation, the production of cigarettes became cheaper and companies needed to expand the population to which they marketed cigarettes. Although pipe smoking was considered a manly past-time, companies marketed cigarettes to all sexes; “by 1949, 81% of men and 39% of women smoked.”[21]
“FI0016276,” Des Moines, IA, 1961 by Campopiano Von Klimo, Melinda/Fortepan Iowa, “https://fortepan.us/photos/FI0016276,” CC-BY-SA 4.0
As early as 1912, the link between lung cancer and smoking was noted, with studies confirming the connection in the 1940s. But it took until the 2000s for this information to break through a narrative that cigarettes were good.
In the 1940s and 1950s, before overwhelming evidence existed about smoking’s health consequences, tobacco companies actually used doctors to market their product. The stories told in advertising was that smoking, or at least smoking this brand of cigarettes, was good for your health. In 1946, a Reynolds ad campaign used the slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” How did Reynolds know this? Well, they would give doctors a free carton of Camel cigarettes, and then ask them what brand they smoked.[22] This campaign ran until 1954, but, as evidence mounted between the link between smoking and negative health outcomes, companies could no longer sell the story that smoking was safe. Instead, they embraced a narrative of individuality.
Advertisement still used under Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.
But, to do that, cigarettes also had to redefine their image, particularly filtered cigarettes. Until the late 1960s, all filtered cigarettes were considered feminine. Real men, it seemed, smoked unfiltered. Marlboro, a filtered cigarette, was therefore considered a feminine product, a woman’s cigarette.
This advertisement is part of The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA) collection and is in the Public Domain.
In fact, in 1924, its slogan was “Mild as May” and “Early ads presented black-and-white sketches of listless flappers, slouched over an ashtray at a bistro table—or a sultry profile of a Gibson girl whose dark lipstick remained unblemished after a drag.”[23]
How to change this image? Tell a different story.
In 1954 emerged the story of Marlboro Man, a character who participated in the heroic myth of the stoic Western cowboy.[24] From 1968 to 1989, the character was portrayed by Darrell Winfield, “the ideal poster child for the rugged, independent self-image Philip Morris wanted to sell its customers.”[25] Even though no television ads for tobacco have been aired since the 1970s, you might recognize the reference to the Marlboro Man. Why? Because the ads told a powerful story and tapped into dominant narratives – and, the ad changed the narrative about Marlboro.
Marlboro advertisements have been successful across the world in conveying an image of rugged masculinity. Here is a billboard appearing in Poland: Domy Towarowe "Centrum" by Cezary Piwowarsk, CC-BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlboro_Man#/media/File:Domy_Towarowe_Centrum.jpg
In an assessment of the ad campaign, The Atlantic explained
The Marlboro Man is the most powerful mascot in American tobacco marketing in history. Since 1972, Marlboro has been the most purchased cigarette brand in the U.S., with sales today of over $23 billion worldwide. But modern cowboys, it turned out, are by and large fictive. Most ranchers don’t smoke tobacco, but rather chew it—smoking a cigarette is physically intrusive if your day is occupied by continuous manual labor. In places like Wyoming . . . the image of the white, adventuresome cowboy in chaps and kerchief, duking it out with Indians alone on the frontier, was cultivated by 19th Century Wild West Shows and used, in part, to entice eastern settlers—and since the early 20th century, ranching has fallen far behind the state's actual economic boon: energy extraction.[26]
So, a mythic character (the cowboy), located in a mythic scene (the West) was used to sell an actual product. The fact that four of the real people who portrayed the Marlboro Man would die from smoking-related diseases does not seem to undermine the story.[27] Why? Because the story participates in larger mythic narratives, narratives that serve the goals of the corporation (to sell product) but not necessarily the needs of people.
By focusing on the lone cowboy, the Marlboro campaign repeated a core ideology of the United States: individualism. In analyzing the power of the campaign, The Atlantic story spoke to a scholar, Pamela Ling, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco who explained:
“Individualism is a core value of American society,” says Ling, “and the whole idea that, ‘I can do this because it's legal and I choose to,’ is very much in line with many American beliefs. Saying that, ‘I choose to smoke, and it’s an expression of my freedom,’ is something that, again, the companies have worked for a long time to reinforce, and it’s something that they know has resonance."[28]
Ling thinks that this framing is clever beyond just appealing to the United States’ individualistic culture:
It also shields [the tobacco companies] from litigation because, if you started smoking because it was your choice, then if you get lung cancer it’s your fault. That’s a very different frame from, “There is a predatory industry that has manipulated your psychology to get you at a vulnerable time to start using an addictive product that you’ll then be unable to stop using, and they should be held responsible for that activity.[29]”
As a result of advertising, it just makes sense that:
*Some cigarettes are masculine (Marlboro) and others are feminine (Virgina Slims)
*Smoking is a choice (not an addiction)
*Smoking is a way to show your individualism, that you are not controlled by others (even though you are actually deeply influenced by advertising and an addictive drug)
*If you feel a lack, buying a product can help you fill that void
The power of advertising – or even cigarette product placement in movies and shows, to tell a story of the desirability of smoking – is why television and radio advertising of cigarettes was banned in 1971 (at which point companies then shifted their emphasis to print advertising).[30] By the 2000s and 2010s, most media companies also voluntarily refrained from showing smoking in movies targeted at young audiences.
ACTIVITYViewing media oppositionally How familiar were you with the Marlboro Man before you read the above passages? When you think of smoking now, do you accept the narrative of individualism? What about how it relates to e-cigarettes and vaping? What was required to be able to view the ads oppositionally in the time of cigarette ads on TV (e.g., 1950s and 1960s)? How might a person have viewed the ads and made a negotiated reading in the time of cigarette ads on TV (e.g., 1950s and 1960s)? The ability to conduct an oppositional reading requires awareness, skill, knowledge, and the ability to imagine how the world and its values might be different. Communication scholar Bonnie Dow observed that it is easy to “acquire the codes necessary for preferred readings” while “the acquisition of codes for negotiated or oppositional readings is more difficult and less common.”[31] This class seeks to provide you with the code, or vocabulary, with which to critically and oppositionally understand media texts. |
Examples of Polysemic Readings
This unit is meant to introduce you to the ideas of media polysemy and polyvalence, and point to the possibility of oppositional readings. Later sections in this Handbook will explore examples in more detail. For now, we quickly introduce you to two examples: one that identifies a dominant frame and another that outlines the characteristics of an oppositional interpretation.
Dominant frame: the male gaze
In 1975, media theorist Laura Mulvey published an essay that identified a hegemonic dominant approach to media production and consumption: “the male gaze”.[32] It would become one of the most frequently cited essays in media studies. Mulvey critiqued cinema by arguing it not only highlights woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness but builds the way a woman is to be looked at into film itself. According to Mulvey, the dominant gaze in film was the male gaze. The eyes looking through the camera (film directors and directors of photography were almost always male), the eyes of the lead character (who was almost always male), and the gaze of the audience (who was presumed male) looked at women as passive objects of desire and males as active agents of action. We will review more of Mulvey’s theory in a later unit, but for now we just wanted to offer it as an example of how hegemonic ideologies influence the dominant way a media text is interpreted. If you view a visual text like a film or TV show through a male gaze, you are participating in a dominant interpretation, or dominant frame.[33]
Oppositional interpretation to the male gaze
Because of Mulvey’s focus on sex difference, their theory elides other differences, like race. Not only is there a male gaze, but there is also a white gaze. Media theorist bell hooks pointed this out in their book Black Looks when they critiqued Mulvey’s work and noted: “Feminist film theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference—of racialized sexual difference.”[34] As an antidote to this erasure, hooks offered an oppositional way of reading dominant media texts by asking “From what political perspective do we dream, look, create, and take action?”[35]
Hooks’s point is that audiences can resist media hegemony by embracing an oppositional perspective. The characteristics of hooks’s oppositional gaze include the following:
- “[C]onsider the perspective from which we look, vigilantly asking ourselves who do we identify with, whose image do we love.”[36] Here, think about through whose eyes you look, how you have been positioned as an audience, and with what characters you identify.
- Be critical of “colorful ethnicity for the white consumer appetite that makes it possible for blackness to be commodified in unprecedented ways, and for whites to appropriate black culture without interrogating whiteness or showing concern for the displeasure of blacks.”[37] Here, you need to consider not just who is represented, but how and why they are represented.
An oppositional gaze recognizes that audiences are active in meaning creation, and they are as much a producer of media as a consumer. It also requires that you act, that you make conscious choices about what you consume, buy, and share. Because media representations are not only a reflection of social reality, but also actively construct it, to be a critical user of media, and not just be used by it, an oppositional gaze is necessary.
Ways in which this oppositional gaze can inform media criticism are explored in the units in the next section.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
- How do people actively and creatively engage with media through polysemous and polyvalent readings?
- What is an example of a dominant (or preferred) reading and how does this reading connect to the idea of hegemony?
- What is an example of a negotiated reading?
- What is an example of an oppositional (or resistive) reading?
- How does the history of cigarette advertising illustrate the tobacco industry’s success at creating multiple dominant narratives to serve the company’s shifting needs?
- How does the “male gaze” represent a dominant approach to media production and consumption?
- How does Mulvey’s theory about the male gaze also represent a dominant critical approach to media analysis?
- In what ways can people reevaluate and reinterpret the male gaze theory?
[1] John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987).
[2] Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 3e (London: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[3] Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[4] Fiske, Television Culture, 117.
[5] John Fiske, “Television, Polysemy and Popularity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), 392.
[6] Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84 (1998), 395-415, 398.
[7] Ceccarelli, 399.
[8] Condit, Celeste Michelle. "The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no, 2 (June 1989), 103-122, 103-104.
[9] Condit, 106.
[10] Condit, “The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy," 103-104.
[11] Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language. Edited by Stuart Hall, et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980); See Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding and hegemonic, mixed, and counterhegemonic; Media hegemony, the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer), media polyvalence (Condit), media polysemy (Fiske); Althusser: https://literariness.org/2016/04/12/althusserian-marxism/;
[12] Hall, 133.
[13] 405.
[14] Ralina L. Joseph, in Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
[15] Ralina L. Joseph, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
[16] Hall, 102.
[17] 404.
[18] James Allen, ed., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Sante Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).
[19] “Senate Apologizes for Inaction on Lynchings,” NBC News, June 13, 2005, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8206697/ns/us_news-life/t/senate-apologizes-inaction-lynchings/#.W-3onlIkrXQ.
[20] 151 Cong. Rec. S6364-S6388.
[21] “Smoking: Advertising the Facts,” Science Museum, August 12, 2019, https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/smoking-advertising-facts
[22] Becky Little, “When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking,” The History Channel, March 28, 2023, https://www.history.com/news/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement
[23] Adrien Shirk, “The Real Marlboro Man,” The Atlantic, February 17, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-real-marlboro-man/385447/
[24] White, Cameron, Oliffe, John L., Bottorff, Joan L. (2012). From the Physician to the Marlboro Man: Masculinity, Health, and Cigarette Advertising in America, 1946–1964. Men and Masculinities, 15(5), 526-547.
[25] Shirk, “The Real Marlboro Man.”
[26] Shirk.
[27] Matt Pearce, “At least Four Marlboro Men Have Died of Smoking-Related Diseases,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-marlboro-men-20140127-story.html
[28] Shirk.
[29] Shirk.
[30] Andrew Glass, “Congress bans airing cigarette ads, April 1, 1970,” Politico, April 1, 2018,
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/01/congress-bans-airing-cigarette-ads-april-1-1970-489882
[31] Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-time Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 13.
[32] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975), 6–18.
[33] Mulvey basically argued it was impossible to avoid the dominant male gaze unless one engaged in avant garde film. Mulvey was pretty absolutist about the hegemonic power of the male gaze, arguing it was unavoidable in mainstream media.
[34] Bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 123.
[35] hooks, 4,
[36] hooks, p. 6.
[37] hooks, 154.
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