Women Confronting and Creating Culture

1. Women Confronting and Creating Culture

2. What is Culture? • “The shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization.” • “The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.” • “The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that is both a result of and integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.” • “The accumulated habits, attitudes, and beliefs of a group of people that defines for them their behavior and way of life; the total set of learned activities of a people.”

3. Popular Culture…taken from Common Culture by Petracca and Sorapure • “is the shared knowledge and practices of a specific group at a specific time” • “both reflects and influences people’s way of life” • “is transitory, subject to change, and often an initiator of change”

4. Web 2.0 • The Internet was conceived as a utopian space where gender, race, class, and sexuality were neutral forces • Instead, virtual realities tend to reinforce current social standards about gender and other identities • Gendered and racialized content supported by advertising, entertainment, and pornography • Traditional ideas about gender are reinforced by the ways women and men use the Internet

5. Background Debates • Does the mass media have a significant amount of power over its audience, or does the audience ultimately have more power than the media?

6. John Fiske: Audience Power “Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the on-going process of producing their popular culture.”

7. Theodor Adorno: Media Power • The Culture Industry is a well-oiled machine producing entertainment products in order to make profit. Media products are not “art,” they are commodities. • “The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.” The culture industry “impedes the development of autonomous independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.”

8. The average American consumer spends 11 hours a day interacting with major media (primarily TV, Internet, Mobile Device). Source: eMarketer Media Consumption

9. Television, Film, Print • We see traditional gender roles portrayed, or women are objectified, or women’s accomplishments are overstated • We see lawyers, detectives, and surgeons, but the reality is that the top five jobs for women today include administrative assistant, registered nurse, elementary and middle school teacher, cashier, and retail salesperson

10. Music, Literature, and Art • In much of today’s music (lyrics and video), women are objectified, or violence against women is glorified, although more women performers are finding their voices and female composers are finding audiences. • Women writers have long been ignored but are fighting to be heard. • Women artists are struggling for recognition and representation.

11. Deconstructions • Viewing cultural artifacts through a particular framework which draws their attention to the artifact itself, as a whole and/or its parts, as well as the origin of production. • Exposing what is absent, what is taken for granted, and what is centrally located versus what is forced to the peripheries.

12. Studying Gender in the Media • Count the women and the subject areas in which they appear. • Are women allowed to speak with dignity and authority? • Are traditional gender roles reinforced? • Are active women represented as superwomen? • Does their portrayal reinforce the stereotype of women as docile, emotional, non-analytical, technically inept?

13. Studying Gender in the Media • Are women represented primarily as sex-objects? • What physical attributes apply to men and women? • Does the material normalize violence against women? • Are women represented as one-dimensional or multidimensional? • Does the material reflect the diversity of women and men in the community?

14. Bechdel Test for Films • Are there two or more women in the film who have names? • Do they talk to each other? • Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?