Media Representation Theories

• HALL'S REPRESENTATION THEORY:

  We can understand representations by looking at the meaning of media language.

  Media products contain a ‘shared conceptual roadmap’ which audiences are familiar with which helps them understand the representations.

  The media contains stereotypes when there is an inequality of power that reduces groups of people to a few (often negative) characteristics.
• GAUNTLETT'S IDENTITY THEORY:

  The media provides us with ‘tools’ or resources that we can use to construct our own identities.

  In the past, he media tended to covey singular straightforward messages about ideal types of identities. However, the media today offer us a more diverse range of stars, icons and characters from whom we may pick and mix different ideas.
• VAN ZOONEN'S FEMINIST THEORY:

  Gender is constructed through discourse - the meaning varies according to cultural and historical context

  The display of women’s bodies as objects to be looked at is a core elements of western patriarchal culture.

  Mainstream culture construct the male body as a spectacle and the female body as an object.
• BELL HOOKS' FEMINIST THEORY:

  Feminism is a struggle to end sexist/patriarchal oppression.

  Feminism is a political commitment rather than a lifestyle choice.

  Race and class, as well as sex, determine the extent to which individuals are exploited, discriminated against or oppressed.
• BUTLER'S GENDER PERFORMATIVITY THEORY:

  Identity is performatively constructed by the very expressions that are said to be its results - it is manufactured through a set of acts.
• GILROY'S ETHNICITY POST-COLONIALISM THEORY:

  Colonial discourses continue to inform contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the postcolonial era.

  Civilisation constructs racial hierarchies and sets up binary oppositions based on notions of otherness.