MODULE 2, UNIT 2

Construction of Gender

Goal:  Explain how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the media, and how residual, dominant, and emergent discourses are competing for prominence.

The Construction of Masculinity and Femininity

This unit first offers a vocabulary for the study of gender and sex in media representations. Key terms include: sex, gender, sexuality, and hegemonic masculinity.

We then analyze dominant representations of masculinity in contrast to residual discourses. Do representations of manhood today remain limited to a general celebration of heterosexual “tough guys” who solve problems through violence? In what ways? Where might you find examples of alternative forms of masculinity? You will examine the resulting social repercussions of these portrayals and find and analyze emergent discourses of masculinity, including portrayals of non-hegemonic identities.

Next, we examine dominant representations of femininity in contrast to residual discourses. How are women portrayed as weaker, decorative objects? How are women generally cast as objects of heterosexual desire and as less capable than heterosexual men? And how (and why) have these kinds of portrayals been created over centuries?  You’ll examine the resulting social repercussions of these portrayals, and also explore this dominant discourse in the context of emergent media discourses of femininity.

We first focus on masculinity and then on femininity. Each section on gender concludes with an examination of a rapidly expanding spectrum of gender representations that resist dominant representations and hegemonic responses to those representations. Resistance to hegemonic ideology does not proceed unanswered. Dominant ideologies respond to counterhegemonic media representations in a variety of ways (we provide links to stories about each example if you want to read more):

1) Dominant ideology can use structural power in the from of laws to prohibit some representations (for example, recent legislation banning drag performances),

2) Dominant ideology can use disciplinary power to punish and ridicule media representations that are not normative (for example, online troll’s targeting of Leslie Jones after the Ghostbusters reboot),

3) Dominant ideology can seek to return to some aspects of residual discourse (for example, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, which calls for men to assert their masculinity and answer the ancient call to be warriors),

4) Dominant ideology can seek to co-opt the new representations by commodifying them and stripping the representations of their transgressive potential (for example, the use of digital blackface on social media).

When emergent voices gain too much power, such as the first female authors of captivity narratives in the last chapter, backlash can take many forms, all of which involve power.

A Vocabulary for Analyzing Media Representations of Sex and Gender

A plethora of signs and symbols structure people’s understanding of sex and gender. To be able to analyze media representations requires a vocabulary that enables you to unpack different ideological orientations.^[1] 

Sex refers to a biological designation. Biological influences on sex include chromosomes, hormones, and endocrinology. Although sex refers to biological categories, people’s understanding of the categories is socially constructed. A binary approach to sex believes there are only two sexes: male or female. However, as we noted in an earlier unit, biologists know there are multiple sexes. Language to reflect this includes terms like male, female,  intersex, trans, and nonbinary.

Gender refers to the cultural expectations attached to how bodies should perform their sex. Hence, the hegemonic social belief is that females should be feminine and males should be masculine. The sex binary led to a gender binary, where one was either masculine or feminine. As any study of global cultures will illustrate, it is clear there is far more than one way to be masculine or one way to be feminine.

Because gender expectations are attached to a body because of its sex, we use the construction sex/gender when analyzing media representations, but we also want to make clear that when studies are tracking the presence of women, men, and nonbinary people, we use the term sex. When analyzing expectations attached to how bodies should act, move, talk, and appear, we refer to gender.

Multiple masculinities and multiple femininities exist. But, as you might expect, some performances of masculinity and femininity become dominant, or hegemonic. Sociologist R. W. Connell recognized that a range of masculinities exist, but one form became a hegemonic masculinity, which is White, upper-class, wage-earning, heterosexual, athletic, and privileged over femininity. It is hegemonic not because it is the most common form of masculinity, but because it is considered normative: it is the form of masculinity against which other forms are judged, and judged as lacking. Thus, hegemonic masculinity constitutes a “pattern of practices . . . that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue.”^[2] For an example of how media reinforce hegemonic masculinity, see Nick Trujillo’s article “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound: Media Representations of Nolan Ryan and American Sports Culture.”

Sexuality refers to the range of intimate physical practices in which a person engages. It includes orientations (heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual) as well as forms of desire (asexual, aromantic). The reason sexuality is included as a concept in relation to sex and gender is because these three identity ingredients are often conflated. For example, a feminine man might be perceived to be gay or a masculine woman perceived to be a lesbian.

Just as some forms of gender function hegemonically, so, too, do some forms of sexuality. The cultural privileging of heterosexuality is referred to as heteronormativity.

Heteronormativity refers to

the presumptions that there are only two sexes; that it is “normal” or “natural” for people of different sexes to be attracted to one another; that these attractions may be publicly displayed and celebrated; that social institutions such as marriage and the family are appropriately organized around different-sex pairings; that same-sex couples are (if not “deviant”) a “variation on” or an “alternative to” the heterosexual couple.^[3] 

In summarizing this definition, sociologist Celia Kitzinger made clear how heteronormativity is an example of a hegemonic ideology by writing “Heteronormativity refers, in sum, to the myriad ways in which heterosexuality is produced as a natural, unproblematic, taken-for-granted, ordinary phenomenon.”^[4]

The normativity part of this term is important. Here, norm does not mean normal as a value judgment, or norm as an indication of what is most common. Instead, normativity refers to the “process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values.”^[5] Something is normative not when it is most common or normal, but when it is the standard against which all other things are judged.

As you might expect, media have an immense amount of power to construct, establish, produce, and reproduce normative ideology. From fairy tales with their happy endings of the prince saving the princess, to soap operas with their emphasis on heterosexual coupling, to rom-coms, to the marriage industry, heterosexuality is held out as the most good, desirable, moral, rational, and superior.                                                    

As much as media can reinforce hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity, media also offer space to rethink dominant ideology. Australian social scientist Rob Cover (2019) studied sites like OKCupid and Tumblr and found that young digital media users have added “more than one hundred nuanced sexual and gender labels, such as heteroflexible, bigender, non-binary, asexual, sapiosexual, demisexual, ciswoman, antiboy, transcurious, and many more.”^[6] 

Researching Gender Representation in Media                

To understand the way sex, gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity play out in media representations requires media research. Analysts track media content, look at patterns and trends, collect statistics and examples, and make conclusions about who is represented and how they are represented. A number of excellent resources exist that offer comprehensive assessments of media representation of sex, gender, and sexuality.

The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has a think tank called the Inclusion Initiative. It conducts original research on entertainment media (e.g., Netflix, movies, music, television) to offer data about representation.  For a list of all their studies, visit: https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/annenberg-inclusion-initiative/gender

The Geena Davis Institute also conducts original research, carefully measuring dialogue to assess representation of sex, as well as race, sexuality, disability, age, and body type using a research tool the Institute developed. In describing their research, the Institute explained:

The Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-IQ), is a groundbreaking research tool comprised of a hybrid methodology that leverages machine learning to analyze audio and video media content … The GD-IQ also incorporates Human Expert Coding to determine the representation of six identities (gender, race/ethnicity, LGBTQIA+, disability, age 50+, and body type).^[7]

You are aware only of the media you watch, and descriptions of media may not resonate or sound familiar with your experiences. But, to study media as a system requires systematic analyses of all media content: visual and verbal. This tool enables researchers to study large swaths of media (like all movies, or all Netflix shows).

An example of gender research in the media: Representations of masculinity

A recent Geena Davis Institute study analyzed masculinity and gaming by studying both game content  as well as gaming commentary and audience interaction on streaming platforms – ”the ecosystem of streaming video game play to understand where and how masculinity is enacted.” In other words the study researched the video game content, the way boys (ages 10-26) talked about it, the video game chat features themselves, and learned even more through a survey of these boys and young men.^[8]

Some of the main findings:

Among all characters, male characters outnumber female characters four-to-one (79.9% compared with 20.1%).

Female characters are nearly five times as likely to be shown with some level of nudity than male characters (12.4% compared with 2.5%); therefore, while female characters are showing up in video games, they are likely to be sexualized.

Nearly nine-in-ten (89.3%) leading characters are White.

LGBTQIA+ characters are virtually absent from video game representations; only 0.03% characters were identified as LGBTQIA+, far below the 4.5% of the US population who identify as LGBTQIA+.

Masculine norms are strongly upheld, with four-in-five (81.9%) male characters displaying at least one pillar of masculinity.

All of the top streamers are men.

Sexist language was used in 37.7% of segments, with “bitch” being the most common gender slur used by streamers (28.9% of gameplay segments)

Streamers used racist language in 5.6% of gameplay segments, with 2.2% of segments featuring gamers speaking in stereotypically foreign accents for comedic effect.^[9]

Other resources for instructors that tackle media representations of masculinity

• Videos or talks by Jackson Katz are recommended:

•  Tough Guise (1999)
•  Tough Guise 2 (2013)
•  The Man Card: White Male Identity from Nixon to Trump (2022)

• The Mask You Live In, documentary film, 2015--PART I (00-56 minutes) written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom and premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The Mask You Live In explores what Newsom perceives to be harmful notions about masculinity in mainstream American culture. The first half of the film takes on the cultural determinism position common in media studies--that masculinity is a social construction. This section ends with former football player (now coach) Joe Ehrmann saying “I think the great myth in America today is that sports builds character. But sports does not build character unless a coach intentionally teaches it and models it. When I did start coaching I didn’t want to be a transactional coach using kids for my own identity. So I just started with a very simple philosophy: if you’re going to be a transformational coach, you’ve got to know what you’re transforming. I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity, who will be responsible to change the world for good. That’s what sports ought to be about.”
• You Throw Like A Girl (2020) (Trailer)
• The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men (2011)
• Codes of Gender: Identity & Performance in Popular Culture (2009)

Residual Representations of Femininity

To better understand residual representations of femininity, it is useful to consider the works of both John Berger and Laura Mulvey.

Men Act, Women Appear

In 1972, John Berger (writer) and Mike Dibb (producer) created a BBC television series in 1972 called Ways of Seeing, which was then adapted to the book of the same name, written by John Berger.^[10] The program and book have been hugely influential in media studies, the visual arts, and analyses of popular culture. In Chapter 3 (or Episode 2 in the series), Berger analyzed the emergence of the female nude during the Renaissance as part of the tradition of European oil painting, an industry controlled by men: male artists produced art for male consumers. Berger was interested in power relations and traced a continuous thread from Renaissance artwork to modern day advertising, whereby women are the subject of male idealization or desire, positioned for the male gaze.

Venus and Amor, Jacques de Gheyn (II), 1605 - 1610, Rijksmuseum, Public Domain. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=nude+oil+painting&p=2&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=6#/SK-A-2395,18

The Finding of Moses, Moyses van Wtenbrouck, c. 1625 - c. 1627, Rijksmuseum, Public Domain, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=nude+oil+painting&p=2&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=8#/SK-A-4673,20

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe / Luncheon on the Grass, Edouard Manet, 1863, Public Domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manet,_Edouard_-_Le_D%C3%A9jeuner_sur_l%27Herbe_(The_Picnic)_(1).jpg

Cour d’Amour, Émile Bernard, 1890. Public Domain:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%89mile_Bernard_Cour_d%27amour_1890.jpg

Nu couché les bras croisés derrière la tête Reclining Nude, Amedeo Modigliani, 1917, The Museum of Metropolitan Art.  Public Domain.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amedeo_Modigliani_Reclining_Nude_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art.jpg

Additionally, Berger recognized that women – so often identified as the one being looked at – have internalized this gaze:  “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object–and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”^[11] 

This idea – a centuries-old residual discourse – continues to influence media production and consumption, even the personal use of media today. A study of the images college-age people shared on social media found that men posted images in which they “embody strength and power and . . . women portray themselves as attractive and affiliative.”^[12] Men tend to post action shots while women tend to post images of themselves appearing pretty.

Male Gaze

The famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey was published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen.^[13] Mulvey argued that the conventions of popular narrative cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious. It’s one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Using this framework guided Mulvey to think about what films do psychologically. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s writing, psychoanalytic theory explores the human unconscious. In terms of film, this means Mulvey explored what about film gives people pleasure from looking: the pleasure of looking at women as a source of erotic pleasure. It also calls for people to analyze how watching film affects people’s conceptions of themselves (their ego): with whom do people identify in the film?

Mulvey introduced the term "male gaze" into the academic lexicon and eventually into common parlance to describe the practice of looking at women for erotic pleasure and looking through men’s eyes in the form of the lead character, director, and assumed audience. Here, think about what it means to gaze instead of just watch, or look, or glance, or witness. When you gaze at someone, you look with desire and longing, and the act of looking includes in it a sense of possession, a right to look and not be looked back at.

Mulvey argued all films are produced through a male gaze and all viewers look with a male gaze, even women. Pay attention to the three components of a male gaze, which is embedded in so much of the media people consume daily. A YouTube video, “Laura Mulvey’s The Male Gaze” by Francesca Johnson visually illustrates Mulvey’s argument (you can also find many other examples of male gaze on YouTube). Mulvey identified three levels of the male gaze:

1. The gaze of the camera
2. The gaze of the male protagonist/figures within the camera (e.g., Jimmy Stewart in the film Vertigo)
3. Our gaze as spectators—we appropriate both the camera’s gaze and the male protagonist’s gaze as our own.

As an example that displaces the male gaze, watch a clip from Australia where the audience is positioned to look at Hugh Jackman through Nicole Kidman’s eyes. Notice the Kidman character's semi-discomfort in this view, while male gaze characters seem to gaze unproblematically.

Male gaze (and Mulvey) critiqued and reinterpreted

Mulvey argued all film was created and viewed through only a white male gaze. They believed the male gaze was so hegemonic that no counterhegemonic gaze (e.g., a female gaze or a gaze of color) was possible. Other media theorists have challenged Mulvey.

Gamman and Marshment explored the possibility of a female gaze; de Lauretis explored the possibility of resistant readings against the male gaze; and bell hooks explored the possibility of an oppositional Black way of looking.^[14] Hooks argued Mulvey failed to take an intersectional approach, emphasizing sex only and not considering the role of race in directing viewing practices:

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.^[15] 

Can you think of films shot through a Black female gaze? A non-white gaze?

Possible examples: Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), see also this related article. For other examples, see this article on Black, female directors “redefining Hollywood through the Black female gaze.”

Male gaze and heteronormativity

The power of the male gaze as a form of disciplinary power is illustrated by how two 2010 movies were rated differently by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA): Blue Valentine and Black Swan. The films had much in common: the female lead received Academy Award nominations, the movies received critical acclaim, and both had a scene depicting cunnilingus. But, the movies received very different ratings: Black Swan was R-rated and Blue Valentine was NC-17-rated (unless it removed the oral sex scene). Communication scholars Katie L. Gibson and Melanie Wolske) found this curious and sought to explain the different ratings of two films that were otherwise quite similar.^[16] 

Their findings confirmed other scholars’ findings about heteronormativity and the male gaze.  Basically,  “explicit and/or graphic films are more likely to receive a lenient MPAA rating if they show heterosexual and male-centered sex.”^[17] Black Swan’s was shot with a male gaze and employed sensationalized (instead of realistic) depictions of sex, so it received the more lenient rating. Blue Valentine’s resistance to the male gaze and depiction of female pleasure earned it a more restrictive rating. Both had a sex scene depicting the same type of sex (oral sex performed on a female body). But, the depiction of sex was not treated the same because one movie challenged the male gaze, and the other movie did not.

Other visual in-class resources for instructors that tackle dominant media representations of femininity

Miss Representation 1hr 25 minutes

This film addresses similar themes on identity as the film The Mask You Live In (it’s by the same director) except the focus is on the representation of women. Keep in mind that Miss Representation was made in 2010, but most of it is still relevant (I wouldn’t assign it if it wasn’t). Be mindful that it was created prior to the #MeToo movement, and don’t watch the whole film, just up to the 51-minutes mark. Important themes include women being valued for their looks above everything else; advertising is based on making women feel insecure; Objectification is so normalized that women are much less likely to run for office, and Hollywood perpetuates the same stereotypes over and over again. Keep a list of what those stereotypes are.

(The first 51 minutes are especially helpful)

Killing us Softly 4 45 minutes

“This highly anticipated update of Jean Kilbourne's influential and award-winning Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, takes a fresh look at American advertising and discovers that the more things have changed, the more they've stayed the same. Breaking down a staggering range of more than 160 print and television ads, Kilbourne uncovers a steady stream of sexist and misogynistic images and messages, laying bare a world of frighteningly thin women in positions of passivity, and a restrictive code of femininity that works to undermine girls and women in the real world. At once provocative and inspiring, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge yet another generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, gender violence, and contemporary politics.”

The Codes of Gender 72 Minutes
“Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.  Viewer Discretion Advisory: This program contains violence, nudity, and sexual themes.”