Notice to authors: Please ask your publishers to send review copies of your books to Professor Shelton Gunaratne , JIC review editor, Mass Communications Department, Moorhead State University, Moorhead, MN 56563, U.S.A.
Dines, Gail, and Jean M. Humez, eds. 1995.
_Gender, Race and Class in Media. A Text-Reader_.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications. xxi+648pp.
At last we have a text-reader on race and class that employs critical
theories that originated in different countries to examine the mass media.
British cultural studies approach informs most of the analyses, and it
draws heavily on the Frankfurt School's critical theory approach as well.
Its focus in the U.S. media, but then this is fast becoming the global
media, so it could be considered an international focus. It is a welcome
addition for journalism and mass communication educators in the
English-speaking world.
The editors state in their preface that they designed this volume to
introduce theoretical concepts in contemporary media studies, survey the
genres of contemporary media, and focus on issues of gender, class and
race from a critical perspective. The book does all of this and fills a
surprising void in media studies at the undergraduate level in the United
States and elsewhere. Through 61 short essays written by a variety of
contributors, the reader can examine issues never condensed before into
one volume. In the past, mass communication educators had to prescribe
several texts each pertaining to a different "minority" or analytical
perspective for courses such as "Women, Minorities and the Mass Media" and
"Diversity and the Media." With this most welcome volume, it is now
all-in-one.
The editors have divided this lengthy book into seven parts: Part I
examines cultural studies, Part II advertising, Parts III and IV sexual
representation, Part V daytime television, Part VI prime time television,
and Part VII music. The book also has a short afterword, a very useful
glossary of terms and an extensive bibliography.
Contributors themselves are demographically representative in gender,
sexual orientation, race and ethnicity categories. This itself is
noteworthy. For example, 43 of 65 contributors are women; seven are
African-American, five are Asian-American, several are gay or lesbian.
The fascinating diversity of viewpoints range from minority experiences
to political angles. They all have in common a liberal, critical
progressive perspective.
George Gerbner's essay on television violence at the end of the book
provides context. I would have my students read this early in the course
so that they "get it." Usually, one has to explain the need for a course
such as "Diversity in the Media"; that it has to do with the social
effects of the media. I would have liked Gerbner to have added a section
on modeling, cultivation and attitude formation because these are
important to an understanding of why this book is important.
Critical scholars will enjoy this text. Others, particularly male
educators, can learn something from it. Fans of the cultural studies
approach will be particularly pleased with it. Educators outside of the
United States may find it too U.S.-focused but then its immediate
audience is North American undergraduates, and its targets are the U.S.
media industries. As an educator, I will also use it for graduate
courses in this topic area because it is the only text available that is
this comprehensive. The editors have made great efforts to make this
information accessible to undergraduates, including those in introductory
media courses. As they say, their goal is to develop broad-based media
literacy at all levels. After reading this book, most undergraduates
will have good critical abilities and a new level of awareness of media
representation of women and minorities.
Strengths of this book are a) its focus on representation and
exploitation of women. Particularly strong is the focus on pornography,
which is not surprising considering that its editors are leaders in this
research; b) Douglas Kellner's introductory article on cultural studies
that sets the stage for the rest of the text; and c) the length of each
article, which makes for easy reading for undergraduates who often don't
fully concentrate when presented with a long chapter to read. Short,
concise articles such as these are good starting points for discussion of
these issues.
An excellent inclusion is the section on resources for media activism at
the back of the book. Students need somewhere to take their newly found
anger and indignation after reading a text such as this or sitting
through a course that uses this book. This very thorough list is likely
to be very useful.
Weaknesses of this book are a) its size (648 pages) although it is most
thorough; b) as previously mentioned, its U.S.-centric focus; and c) its
limited focus on heterosexism, which is the new ground for bigotry in
the United States. As more multiculturalism and racial/ethnic awareness
enters the classrooms, an increasing need will emerge to address issues
of homophobia. This text does some of this, for example, Larry Gross's
excellent article on sexual minorities and the mass media. Lacking is a
focus on gay stereotyping, something that is well-addressed in articles
on African-Americans in the media.
In a subsequent edition, I would like to see an article of some substance
examining how white, heterosexual, middle and upper-class men and women
are represented in the media. This would be a good way to make contrasts and
comparisons and would help to ground the articles in the lived
experiences of the average undergraduate in the United States. Just as
the groundbreaking article published in an anthropology journal in the '70s
entitled "The Nacirema" brought home in a profound way how North Americans see
themselves as the center of the universe, an additional article provided
for contrast in this reader could help mainstream students gauge how
"others" might perceive the way they (mainstreamers) are represented.
Joy F. Morrison, associate professor
Department of Journalism & Broadcasting
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Carson, Diane, Linda Dittmar and Janice R. Welsch, eds. 1994.
_Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism_.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ix+547 pps.
The lofty goal of this collection of essays in feminist film criticism is
"to refocus feminist film study so as to draw in marginalized films,
representations, and perspectives" (p. 21). It is to the editors' credit
that it works nicely on several levels: it provides the uninitiated reader
(e.g., an upper-level undergraduate or a graduate student in film) with a
comprehensive understanding of the state of the art of feminist film
criticism; it strives most earnestly to pay much more than lip service to
the emerging canon of multiculturalism; and, almost as a bonus, it also
presents instructors just delving into the field with a cookbook of
possible feminist-based film courses, their rationale, syllabi, required
readings and screenings.
From the broad and mandatory "U.S. Feminist Film Theory/Criticism" to the
narrow "Black Women in American Films: A Thematic Approach," and the
"Sexual Representation in Film and Video," the editors have compiled a
sweeping survey of film courses that universities in the United States and
abroad are teaching. Thus, even the course files stretch beyond U.S.
borders to pay serious attention to the goal of multiculturalism.
The book sweeps broadly in its attempt to leave nothing and no one --
neither culture nor theoretical framework -- out. Noting that feminist
film theory and scholarship, like other areas of feminist intellectual
endeavors, has great need to expand beyond the traditional examination of
the experience of the middle-class white women, this book then becomes a
celebration of the multicultural experience. In fact, that diverse
approach mandates such an imperative for the editors that they brave the
possible wrath of feminist absolutists by invoking "a caution against
considering women exclusively in terms of gender." While they accept the
belief that gender is, indeed, a "meaningful category" for study, they
offer this reader as a book that highlights "multivalent feminist agendas"
(p. 3).
The 29 essays culled from books and journals date back more than a dozen
years to provide a rich tapestry of the themes and concerns of feminist
film scholarship as it has matured. B. Ruby Rich, in the book's first
essay, lays down a primer on feminist film criticism. Writing in 1978, she
foresaw the evolutionary nature of the field itself and how interconnected
it was with the entire feminist movement: "Feminist film criticism cannot
solve problems still undefined in the sphere of feminist thought and
activity at large" (p. 43). One could hardly expect feminist film
criticism, then, to anticipate the new and ever-widening issues
confronting the scholars who consider film in 1995 from the rich base of
culture, ethnicity and diversity.
While the essays themselves are reprinted from various journals and books,
the editors have taken care to have the authors place the essays into the
present-day context through updated introductions and postscripts. This
assigns the authors to the pleasant task of 20/20 hindsight while removing
guesswork and supposition from the homework of the reader. The readers
know how the essays fit into current day theory and thought because the
authors tell us.
Thus, the editors have thoughtfully laid out the essays to provide the
reader with a broad spectrum of issues and questions. Not only can readers
learn about feminist film criticism as it relates to narrative,
documentary, aesthetics, psychoanalysis and Marxism, but also explore
race, politics, sexual preference, Third World cultures, black culture and
genres as related to films and feminism. The essays also approach the
study of feminist film criticism over time. From the earliest films when
women were silenced through the limitations of technology to the days when
women were symbolically silenced to their ultimate empowerment as
filmmakers and theorists and the excitement generated by that, the essays
track the different voices of women. "Read collectively, they point out
the need to develop analogous lines of inquiry across multiple
differences," the editors promise in their introduction. These essays keep
that promise.
Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, assistant professor
Department of Communication
Seton Hall University
South Orange, N.J.
Crawford, Mary. 1995.
_Talking Difference: On Gender and Language_.
London: SAGE Publications. xiii+207pp.
This book could been have more aptly titled _The political power of
language: A feminist perspective_. Its goal is to reframe the discourse
from a social-constructionist perspective.
The book has six sections: Talking across the gender gap; the search for a
women's language; the assertiveness bandwagon; two sexes, two cultures;
on conversational humor; and toward a feminist theory of gender and
communication.
This review will focus on the "two sexes, two cultures" section, which,
though based on a critique of American life from a Western feminist
perspective, has the greatest relevance to international communication.
Crawford's main thesis is that existing literature does not go far enough
in exposing the role of power in interpersonal communication styles and
that researchers fail to contextualize their interpretations in a larger
social setting. (Communication scholars have addressed the role of power
in communication at length but Crawford largely fails to acknowledge their
works.)
Crawford is concerned that by pointing out differences in language-use
among men and women without exposing the social power structure, schloars
are leaving the door open to backlash against women. What if the powerful
choose to regard these differences as evidence of women's shortcomings
rather than as an equally valid communication style? As a researcher
trained in quantitative methodologies, Crawford also worries that scholars
have not produced hard numbers that point to these stylistic language
differences. She accurately points out that "a difference is not an
explanation"; however, she does not admit that an explanation cannot do
away with differences or realities. In other words, while no one may
quarrel with the role of power in any form of communication, such
acknowledgment alone does not unseat power or remove its manifestations in
different speech patterns; to wit, men are still physically stronger than
women though anyone can cite the statistics and scientifically explain
those power differences.
The focal point of the two-cultures chapter is a detailed critique of the
works by John Gray (_Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus_) and Deborah
Tannen (_You Just Don't Understand_). Crawford correctly asserts that
Gray's book is a validation of the status quo and simply shows women how
to cope with life as it exists. She overlooks the context of the book,
which was originally based on experiences of long-married couples from
middle class backgrounds who were facing sufficient difficulties in their
marriage to seek out Gray's professional services. Such couples were, in
fact, leading "traditional" lives: women living as housewives financially
dependent on their husbands. Gray's response, given the context, is a
first step in reopening communication lines between such couples. By
disregarding that context, Crawford fails to walk the walk in her quest
for contextualizing women's lives and thus misses the reason for the
book's great success.
With even less attention to context, she kills the messenger of bad news
(Tannen) for reporting that in today's American society men and women
bring very different beliefs and experiences to their conversations, the
result of which is common conversational misunderstandings. While Crawford
concedes in several different passages that Tannen's past defense of her
own work responds to most of the charges raised against her, a concern
remains that Tannen's work - taken out of context - is subject to
misinterpretation by the existing power structure and is, therefore,
anti-feminist.
The author seems to have no fundamental quarrel with the theory of "two
sexes, two cultures" other than its current state of development, which
does not include the power variable. She states that this theory does not
go far enough in recognizing the inherent power differential between men
and women, which, she claims, does not exist in cross-cultural
communication across ethnicities. Some may consider her addition of the
power factor as a great benefit to this model, even in the absence of
gender differences. In fact, it seems plausible that she could have built
upon and improved this theory rather than feeling compelled to discredit
it because of this perceived deficiency.
Among the book's inconsistencies or deficiencies are the following: (1)
While the author justly emphasizes the role of contextualization in
lending depth to gender studies, her own references to prior research are
taken out of context. (2) It has the general tendency to discount reality
in the absence of hard scientific data to aid our power of perception.
Though this may be a necessary dogma in the pure sciences, it is more
problematic for a social constructionist's view of reality. (3) The author
lapses into equating gender with sex in specific discussions (e.g., p.
101) and "gender studies" with "feminism" within the general theme of the
book. Many scholars who choose to conduct research in this field or must
introduce gender issues in workshops or curricula outside of women's
studies programs prefer to do so in a non-volatile atmosphere. Though the
ultimate goal of gender studies should be to raise social and political
consciousness, it is not always fruitful to presume that all students of
gender are in an immediate position to embrace a certain feminist
political agenda. This is even more likely to be true in international
communication settings.
Beyond the gender debate, perhaps an even deeper rift exists between the
author and her perceived opponents. One can ultimately attribute the
greatest strength and weakness of this book to its interdisciplinary base.
Crawford has the ability to see the interconnections between her own field
of psychology and linguistics, speech-communication, women's studies and
political science (to name the most prevalent of her sources). As such,
she shows impatience with those who prefer to limit the context of their
work to a sub-speciality of a single discipline. Yet, the danger lurks for
not being able to capture all relevant work in every discipline and to
accept the nuances of research in other fields. To debate the pros and
cons of disciplinary vs. interdisciplinary thinking would require all
genders to come together and redivide along a new set of requisites.
Perhaps that is the ultimate irreconcilable difference in academe.
Dineh M. Davis, assistant professor
Department of Communication
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Estabrooks, Maurice. 1995.
_Electronic Technology, Corporate Strategy, and World Transformation_.
Westport, Conn./London: Quorum Books. xi+269pp.
This book claims to offer insights into "those dynamic mechanisms and
behavioral elements of capitalist systems that result in the creation of
new production processes, new products and services, new markets and new
organizational forms and how it destroys others" (p. ix). The author
locates the emergence of advanced microelectronics, computer,
telecommunication and audio-visual technologies within Schumpeterian
processes of creative destruction and the social, economic and
organisational determinants of technical change.
The argument is set out in the preface: designers, developers and users
of advanced technologies are pushing information and communication
technologies along "an evolutionary course and making them converge and
coalesce into a single 'intelligent technology'" (p. x). Estabrooks argues
that it follows from this that there is "a profound decentralization of
decision-making and economic power throughout the world and the
globalization of everything" (p. x). The text of the book proceeds to
convince the reader that this is so.
The book begins with the history of communication "revolutions," offering
a largely, but not exclusively, North American account of telegraphy,
telephony, broadcasting and the global extension of network
infrastructures. It draws attention to the institutional actors in the
public and private sectors and to the interrelationships among investment
trajectories, the diffusion of advanced technologies and services, and the
regulatory apparatus. The history of the computing industry follows,
encompassing both hardware and software and an account of some of the
skirmishes between IBM, Apple, etc. A detailed account of the
destabilising features of the combined forces of technical innovation and
competition follows. The erosion of the telecommunication monopoly of
AT&T receives the greatest attention, though it also treats the extension
of this trend into other regions of the world. The expansion of the
network universe follows: mobile telephony, satellites, cable television
and optical fibre. The firms and public sector organisations that have
played a role texture each of these accounts. The book carefully
documents the mergers and alliances, and, in some cases, failures in a
highly readable way.
Toward the end of this account in Chapter 5, however, the author asserts
that "technology is running rampant over the entire information and
communications landscape" (p. 130). It is this slippage between a nuanced
account of the interdependence of technical and institutional change, and
assertions that resound with technical determinism that makes it necessary
to read Estabrooks' account as a personal one.
The book moves on to the marriage between the technical infrastructure of
communication and information service applications. The intelligence of
networks - whether public or private, or organised around the Internet -
leads to a discussion of enterprise networking and the widespread
diffusion of client-server and LAN applications, and the multimedia
environment. Again, the book makes occasional assertions about the
effects of these developments on user productivity and the efficiency of
information processing. Such observations are only occasionally nuanced
by counter examples highlighting the unexpected outcomes associated with
learning processes and uncertainty.
The "intelligent economy" treatment looks specifically at the ways changes
in the information and communication, and banking and financial service
sectors are mediating all aspects of production and consumption activity.
This section covers new media from electronic publishing to virtual
reality and from electronic commerce to civil and defence-related
manufacturing and public service, health, educational and other
applications.
Chapter 8 explains why these industrial and technical changes are leading
to the "globalization of everything." If advanced information and
communication-based technologies make it possible to create new
organisational forms, to better manage coordination problems, to speed up
transactions and link up production-consumption chains, then they must
render "the market a more efficient mediator of economic activity and
allocator of economic resources in both national and global economies" (p.
191). Therefore, Estabrooks says, governments should encourage strategies
that promote innovation and change. In the face of globalization,
regulatory and antitrust policies simply become unworkable. The
"globalization of economic a ctivity therefore calls for a new role of
government as coach of the national team of economic players ... and as
the principal agent and architect responsible for managing the human,
financial, and economic resources of the nation" (p. 217).
The author does not portray, alongside his account of technical innovation
and the activities of the corporate suppliers and multinational users, the
unevenness of these transformations or the exclusion of geographical areas
and socio-economic groups which accompanies the phenomena he describes.
He does not see that Schumpeter's insights into "creative destruction" do
not lead to the conclusion that institutions of public governance "wither
away." Rather, they suggest that new forms of public governance systems,
legislation and regulation, emerge to shape and bias technical
developments and economies in new ways. The challenge is to understand
how these developments interact with each other.
This book is not a scholarly work in the conventional sense. Although the
book is situated in a rich vein of the literature on the dynamics of
technical change and innovation, this theoretical apparatus is not
grounded in an empirical methodology familiar to the academic tradition.
This should not detract from the value of the author's assertions about
the changing character of society. His account is detailed and will
provide a very useful introduction for students of technically mediated
forms of social and economic organisation.
Estabrooks recognises the unpredictability of the future in his final
chapter. He claims back a degree of control for the political processes
that shape economic and social change: "Whether we decide as a society to
take advantage of these opportunities and make the necessary changes and
sacrifices ... are questions that cannot be answered at this time"
(p.238). If now is not the time to begin to answer challenging issues of
social and economic control and decision-making, when will the correct
time come? This book does not allow an answer to questions of control
because it is not grounded in the analytical traditions of the social
sciences. What kind of analysis would enable answers to emerge and
provide a basis for policy action? Estabrooks foresees, for example,
challenges to democratic processes, problems associated with imperfect
technologies, and the rise of super rich people complemented by an
underclass in every country. He concludes that change will generate jobs
and wealth in the future. Optimists will concur with Estabrooks'
conclusion. Pessimists will not.
This is an all-too-familiar end to a useful account of transformations in
technologies and the creation and destruction of political and economic
organisation. Dissatisfaction should provide a stimulus to students of
technological and institutional change to provide rigorous analyses of
the underlying features of technical change and the likely outcomes of
emergent systems of public and private governance. This requires that we
look more deeply into the specific character of the dynamic mechanisms and
behavioral elements of capitalist systems in a way that Estabrooks has
not attempted. The challenge to social scientists is to bring their
traditions to bear to deepen understanding of these processes and to
inform policy.
Robin Mansell, professor
Science Policy Research Unit
University of Sussex
Gelder, Ken. 1994.
_Reading The Vampire_.
New York : Routledge. xi+161pp.
In his structuralist analysis of literature entitled _The Fantastic_,
Tzvetan Todorov proposes:
"(P)sychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the
literature of the fantastic. There is no need today to resort to the
devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to
resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by
corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly
inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms" (1973,
p.161).
Gelder's survey of the vampire emphatically expresses a fascination with
the "undead" as it appears in traditional and contemporary fiction. In his
postmodern analytical style, a single perspective does not dominate
Gelder's work; rather psychoanalysis operates alongside a myriad of
critical approaches that writers have used to illuminate various
incantations of this nocturnal creature.
The structure of _Reading The Vampire_ in some ways resembles the format
of Bram Stoker's _Dracula_. Fragmented, parallel perspectives coalesce to
offer an impression of the vampire. Gelder presents a polyphony of
discourse, a panoramic view of the vampire throughout history and across
culture. The thread that binds the chapters of _Reading The Vampire_ is
the attraction of this ambiguous figure. He traces the vampire and its
lustful victims throughout their literary and cinematic heritage from
Stoker and F.W. Murnau to Anne Rice and Neil Jordan.
Gelder's book highlights the perversity of writing about vampires from an
Australian setting. He surveys the most popular Australian vampires
including accounts of the notorious Queensland lesbian vampires alongside
the more overtly fictional depictions of vampires in low-budget
trash-horror cinema and parodies of vampires in documentaries. With its
antipodean origins, Gelder's work is both disconnected and connected to
the global discourse on vampire fiction. He cites the particular ability
of vampires to fascinate and mytify, and is this dialectic of belief and
disbelief that informs his investigation and gives his project a broadly
international context.
Gelder reads the vampire in history as a culturally specific icon. The
undead belong to a particular time and place, representing the underside
of civilization. Conversely, he designates the contemporary vampire as a
"global citizen" with a panoramic world view (p. 111). National borders,
ethnicity and sexuality loose their significance to the postmodern
vampire. The mobility of this incantation does not quite reach the dizzy
heights of the vampiric cyborg that is just beginning to emerge in
contemporary discourse.
Gelder, who teaches popular fiction at the University of Melbourne,
attributes the appeal of the vampire to "their unfailing ability to
fascinate. That is, they evoke a response that is not entirely 'rational'
-- a response that may sit in between disbelief and, in fact, a suspension
of disbelief" (p. x). He refuses to consider the vampire as monstrous,
preferring instead a more romantic approach. Masquerading as idyllic
and/or menacing, it is the bite of the vampire that reveals the mark of
vampirism. In contemporary cinema, a soundtrack that pulsates with rhythm
underscores the visual depiction of the bite and the transference of
fluids, replicating an anxious, adrenaline-pumped heartbeat. Piercing and
penetration constitute the most spectacular as visceral moments. After
viewing Neil Jordan's "Interview With The Vampire" (1995), one spectator
confessed to me that she was so fascinated with the image of the vampire
that she found herself shielding her neck. The entanglement of love and
terror produces a sublime anxiety in the diegesis and in the spectator.
Gelder draws on Freud's conception of the uncanny to account for the
affiliation between the vampire and its victim. An encounter with the
vampire connects the familiar with the unfamiliar, consciousness with
repression. Helene Cixous describes this instant of familiar uncertainty
when she writes that the uncanny is characterised by "a bit too much death
in life, a bit too much life in death" (cited in Gelder, p. 44). The
vampire mediates these realms.
Gelder also incorporates Joan Copjec's suggestion that the anxiety that
is the residue of the uncanny is pre-Oedipal (p. 48). One sensual
incision offers resistance to the symbolic, allowing a regressive fantasy,
a return to the bliss of the imaginary. Vampiric fantasy offers the
masochistic desire of submission to an irrational and overwhelming force.
Gender does not restrain the postmodern vampire. Gelder gestures toward
dissolving the archetypal association between vampirism and masculinity
when he refers to the maternal lesbian vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu's
Carmilla in fiction, and the relationship between Anne Rice and her
admirers in reality. He does not provide a sustained consideration of the
female vampire as a confronting figure. The maternal vampire confounds
notions of biological essentialism by repudiating conventional modes of
reproduction. Instead of giving life, she sucks it dry. Far from
providing nourishment with her bodily fluids (and in an inverse of the
symbiosis of breast feeding), she drains blood. She reproduces
autonomously and by choice. One usually discovers such a perverse
character only on the fringes of vampire culture and then only in a
temporary form. In Carmilla, the vampire appears as an ephemeral vision at
the foot of her daughter's bed.
The response to the vampire is one of terror, and this is certainly not
divorced from the allure of this ghostly presence in Gelder's book. The
vampire is threatening because it has the capacity to penetrate the
surface, to infiltrate, to corrupt and to contaminate. It undermines the
opposition between the self and the Other, something that is integral for
the formation of identity. The vampire compromises the self, with one
bite, the self can "become" the Other.
Gelder suggests that the most receptive reader and viewer of vampire
fiction is the paranoiac (p. 142). Here paranoia is essential for the
recognition of the inadequacy and mobility of identity. The space
between the self and the Other is "a gulf that only the paranoiac
can bridge, where the one is able (and in fact was always able) to
recognise the Other" (p. 125). The paranoiac believes in the illusion
that links the imagined and the real. Gelder writes: "(I)n a world
saturated with illusions, paranoia is a natural condition" (p. 140).
Situating himself amid a plethora of vampiric images, Gelder shares this
postmodern condition. We recognise that he is a "believer," we know that
he suspends his disbelief because he writes about the multiplicity of
vampiric identity. He reveals that images of the vampire saturate even his
personal space when he expresses his gratitude to his partner for putting
up with the vampires that have been hanging around his house for so long
(p. x). The paranoid is perhaps the safest disposition because vampires
always attack the disbelievers.
Reference:
Tzvetan Todorov. _The Fantastic: a structural approach to a literary
genre_, translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press. 1973.
Wendy Haslem, assistant lecturer
Cinema Studies
Monash University
Goban-Klas, Tomasz. 1994.
_The Orchestration of the Media: The Politics of Mass Communication
in Communist Poland and the Aftermath_.
Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. xiii+289 pp.
One sees a new feature in East European media studies: publication of
books in the West by authors who live in Eastern Europe. This was
unthinkable before 1989, the period of the Iron Curtain, when East Europeans
were barely familiar with Western communication research. Lately, with
books written or edited by scholars from East Central Europe, the likes of
Slavko Splichal, Karol Jakubowicz, Tamasz Szecsko, Ildiko Kovats and
Pavao Novosel, the picture is gradually changing. East Europeans now have
an important presence in shaping the field. Usually, their research is
rich with empirical data, and their accounts of the details of the
workings of media are comprehenisve and thorough. With a few exceptions,
however, their studies rarely push communication theory forward.
This is also true of the book under review. The author, Tomasz Goban-Klas,
teaches sociology of culture and communications at Jagelonian University
and directs the Mass Media Research Center in Cracow. While the book fails
to offer deep theoretical insights, it encompasses a lifetime of
observations and meticulous records. It is the most comprehenisve work in
the history of Polish media available in the West. Goban-Klas's research
findings are the result of a systematic effort, supported by various
European institutes and encouraged by scholars at North American
universities.
Goban-Klas quotes the social philosopher Leszek Nowak, according to
whom communism imposes a triple monopoly on the means of coercion
(politics), production (economy) and indoctrination (media). The
contextual parameters of the study are the rise and fall of the Soviet
bloc. The book describes the operation of the media in terms of
totalitarianism and monopolization of information, of closed versus open
media systems.
The author describes the history of Polish mass media within their
sociopoltical framework, provides a coherent description of the eroding
monolithic media system, investigates the professions, institutions and
individuals involved with media, and identifies today's dilemmas (pp.6-7).
The book is a very good study in its genre because it achieves its set
goals. Goban-Klas provides plenty of interesting details. He portrays
important media personalities like Jakub Berman, the main figure in early
censorship, and Jerzy Urban, the speaker of Jaruzelski's government, one
of the most controversial and interesting people in Poland. He offers
interesting observations on issues such as journalism in service of
authorities, the different takes Gierek and Gomulka had on this service,
and the role of journalistic dissent. He also comments on important
incidents that have had a serious impact on developments in Polish media:
the 1977 defection of a censor, the media coverage of the first visit of
Pope John Paul II in 1979, and the 1988 TV debate between Walesa and
Miodowicz that signaled the end of communism.
The book tells the story of the media in Communist Poland in nine chapters:
from the establishment of the system to its gradual destruction. The
author has divided the chapters into precisely defined periods to make them
more informative. The communist takeover in politics and media brings an
end to limited pluralism and sets up the censorship institution. In his
account of the 1950s and '60s, Goban-Klas directs his attention to the
role of student publications, of protest movements and alternative media,
including cross-border broadcasting and the publications of the Roman
Catholic church. He also analyzes the nationalist surges and the prominent
anti-Semitic campaign of 1968.
The book explores the Polish experience in overcoming communism in full
detail. The years between 1970 and 1980 were also times of dissidents'
discordance, of centralization of the media system and debates over
constitutional provisions of media freedom. This led to the re-birth of
the underground press and the domination of the Solidarity media until the
introduction of martial law in December 1981. Goban-Klas speaks of
openness before _glasnost_, and describes the road to the agreements on
censorship and access to the media. The time of martial law is associated
with topics such as the commnication blackout and the measures for
"normalization" and taming of the journalists. The revival of the
underground media and the organization of a Catholic press council
occurred concurrently. The book explores the gradual assertion of
Solidarity of 1989-1990 as the last event of the communist period.
The third part of the book examines the newest developments in emerging
"polyphonic" media. The new media landscape includes changes in the
ownership of major newspapers, in broadcasting policies, in the attitudes
of the audiences. New relations between media and politics are in place:
Solidarity has lost its glamour, the government still controls
broadcasting, and there are controversies about the new media legislation.
Goban-Klas describes a series of unanticipated difficulties: the aggressive
interference of Roman Catholicism in the media, the lack of a professional
code for journalists, the battle over the airwaves, and the accusations
that media are crypto-communist. There are new media dilemmas:
commercialization vs. politicization, specialized vs. mass media,
privatization vs. monopolization, deregulation vs. control, secularization
vs. Christianization, and globalization and parochialization. Goban-Klas
offers a table that summarizes the structural changes in media doctrines,
affiliation, economics and output (p. 240).
Helpful notes supplement each chapter. The appendices include a
comprehensive list of acronyms, a list of archival sources and newspapers,
12 pages of selected bibliography and a name index.
The book is dedicated to the "courageous Polish journalists, editors and
printers who in various ways opposed the Communist Party controllers,
safeguarding the freedom of thought and fighting for the freedom of the
press." In spite of this clearly indicated preference for the dissident
tradition, Goban-Klas does not allow himself to be biased and remains an
independednt critical observer. He is committed to depicting the
controversies of the media reality, objectively reports on the merits and
the faults of everybody, and does not hesitate to criticize whenever the
post-Communist reality disappoints.
Dina Iordanova, lecturer
College of Communication
University of Texas at Austin
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn. 1995.
_The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication_.
London: SAGE Publications. vii+228pp.
This is not an easy book. Yet it is an important one because it has
brought together a range of theories and analytic practices within the
often very undertheorised area of mass communication research and
synthesised those theories in a way which has, as its primary motivation,
the development of an understanding of the social production of meaning.
To that end, it has explored and problematised many of the traditional
discourses of mass communication, not so much within the more traditional
empirical approaches to quantitative analysis of data, but within a
framework that puts meaning first.
By putting meaning first, Jensen recognises and explores the politics and
culture of mass-mediated signs of modernity based mainly on Peircean
semiotics and pragmatics. This constitutes a reorientation of mass
communication toward a social theory which, contrary to Saussurean
semiology that has dominated in this area, recognises and theorises
reception, social uses and the impact of the mass media in a way that
foregrounds "the production and circulation of meaning in society and,
significantly, the activity of audiences in that process" (p. 3).
The text begins with three chapters that take a wide sweep through
structuralism, post-structuralism, pragmatism and, in particular, Peircian
semiotics. It culminates in four models of social semiosis (deterministic,
generative, stochastic and indeterministic). In this way, Jensen outlines
what he considers to be the main challenge for a social semiotics of mass
communication by exploring some of the limitations of structuralism and
post-structuralism. He does this by exploring different theoretical,
methodological, ontological and epistemological assumptions involved in
establishing an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and explaining
the social production of meaning. He does this within the terms of a
social semiotics which recognises that semiosis is performative and that
discursive difference will make a social difference.
In the opening chapters, Jensen argues persuasively for a repositioning of
Peircian semiotics and pragmatism, attempting to recover much that has
been lost from Peirce because of the dominance of de Saussure. That we
still have to do this in the 1990s never ceases to amaze me, but as Jensen
points out repeatedly, dominance of those models of language and semiosis
that have refused to engage with meaning and the politics of communication
are still prime around the world. The distinction he constantly
foregrounds is a simple one: "semiotic action is a constitutive element of
meaningful society" (p. 35), unlike semiology that positioned verbal
language as the model for understanding all systems of signification.
His aim, then, is to reconstruct a social science for mass communication
research. At the centre of this social science is a recognition that "the
mass media are institutions of recontextualisation" (p. 50), which can be
equated with Richard Rorty's suggestion that by "ascribing meaning to
other people, everyday events and social structures, humans articulate and
rearticulate society" (p. 48). Jensen's main point of (re)
contextualisation is that "in order to identify the principles in forming
meaning production, there is a special call for empirical studies which
relate the analysis and interpretation of meaning to a specific context of
action, within a theory of social semiotics" (p. 52).
Jensen explores that theory of social semiotics in the rest of the book.
He develops it in particular in chapters 4 and 5, positioning mass
communication as a variety of social semiosis. Then he goes on to address,
in a variety of ways (most particularly in chapters 5, 6 and 7 using the
dis courses of television news and television flows), how to study mass
communication "as a discursive practice in social context" (p. 55). This
is where the book begins to get interesting, arguing as it does that "any
theory of mass communication must come to terms with the dichotomies of
modern culture" (p. 56) and, of course, recognising that effective
understanding of modern cultures requires a reflexivity totally lacking in
traditional mass communication approaches. The mass media and
"institutionalised cultural activity," he argues, occurs in the "context
of the everyday." It is, therefore, a situated social semiosis "drawing on
face-to-face interactions, mass communication and other communicative
encounters" (p. 57). It is this situated social semiosis that Jensen
argues "is a necessary condition for the reproduction of meaningful social
relations" (p. 57).
I suspect that Jensen, like many others before him, will not be as
successful in the project he sets himself in this book. Mass communication
researchers tend to be hard to change. His final sentence in this book is:
"Social semiotics can make a difference by exploring the forms of
communication and society that might be" (p. 194). We can only wish him
good luck with that aim in a world of mass communication research that
traditionally is barely able to cope with what already exists, let alone
with what might be.
David Birch, professor and pro-vice-chancellor (academic)
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton, Qld.
Kuhn, Raymond. 1995.
_The Media in France_.
London and New York: Routledge. xii+284pp.
Raymond Kuhn, editor of _The Politics of Broadcasting_ and _Broadcasting
and Politics in Western Europe_, has made an important contribution to
international communication with _The Media in France_. The senior
lecturer and department head of political science at the University of
London's Queen Mary and Westfield College, he has produced the first
comprehensive work available on this area in English. Its appearance at
the end of the Mitterrand era makes it timely reading.
The book presents an overview of French media, going from a succinct
summary of the newspaper press at the debut of the Third Republic in 1870
to an examination of the current audiovisual landscape in the Fifth
Republic. Understanding the state's relationship to the media is
essential, particularly in a country which has experimented with most of
the forms of government that Western society has conceived. Kuhn focuses
on this relationship, and his historical approach to the political and
economic character of the subject makes the book valuable not only to
students of media but to anyone interested in contemporary French or
European history.
France's strong tradition of state intervention stands as the defining
political context, but press history exhibits a pattern in which the
government relaxes controls as a medium matures and private interests
take hold. Kuhn points out that one should not view the process of
economic and political liberalization which has occurred, particularly
since the 1980s for the broadcast media, as continuing or irreversible.
A crisis could prompt the state to return to its classic _dirigiste_ role.
Treating each medium in its chronological turn, Kuhn offers dramatic
evidence of this pattern first in the newspaper world. France, on the
eve of World War I, produced more dailies per capita than any other
European country. The golden age ended abruptly when the government
introduced a heavy-handed wartime program of censorship and propaganda.
Constraints on production and distribution deepened the crisis. Post-war
newspapers began a long period of decline, with Parisian dailies
suffering the most. Revelations about press corruption and the murky
interventions of industrialist newspaper owners took a further toll
during the inter-war years.
Kuhn, perhaps wisely, limits his review of what historians describe as
"the rotten press" of this period. Following the Liberation, seizure of
newspapers deemed to have collaborated drew upon idealistic impulses to
purify the press of corrupt, moneyed influences. It also reflected a
political determination to remove the discredited opposition. Kuhn
describes the post-war reforms as "nothing short of a wholesale
revolution in the French press system." Aimed at blocking economic
threats to press pluralism, the reforms reversed the _laissez-faire_
provisions of France's 1881 press statute which had been designed to
guarantee a free press by blocking state intervention.
At the same time, the government established the national press agency,
Agence France-Press, and created what still constitutes one of the most
extensive systems of financial aid to the press. It also nationalized
the radio and the nascent television system, an act that appears less
exceptional in the post-war European context where state broadcasting
monopolies became the norm.
The state's hold on the broadcast media did not loosen until the
Socialists came to power in 1981. Liberating the airwaves had been one
of their campaign promises, and radio broadcasting opened up very
quickly. All the same President Franois Mitterrand did not break the
state television monopoly until late 1985 when the conservatives'
imminent rise to power forced the Socialist government to redefine the
French television world.
Two new private networks, awarded to groups agreeable to the Socialists,
went on the air in the final weeks of Mitterrand's majority government.
Under Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, the triumphant conservatives
reassigned ownership to their own more politically sympathetic partners
as well as privatizing the nation's oldest, largest network.
In these less than coherent circumstances, French television entered a
period of rapid expansion. More networks, longer broadcast schedules,
and insufficient production capacity contributed to a surge in imported
programs, particularly from America. Quotas have been introduced to
balance such programming, but the commercial character of the today's
television market now dominates network program decisions. Kuhn says it
is not clear how successful French protectionist measures will be in
promoting French productions and programming.
Kuhn has dedicated most of the book to broadcast media, and the
remarkable events of the last decade alone make this area a rich
subject. Reflecting a long interest in the broadcast field, he has made
a good choice. These media have had a more interesting development than
people outside France realize. In the chapters on radio and the first
years of television, Kuhn describes the political drama that existed
during the less complicated state monopoly period. A chapter on the new
media of cable and satellite shows the government steering an uncertain
course under conflicting guidance from technocrats and political
leaders.
The state, as Kuhn demonstrates, is a principal actor during all this
time. By the 1990s, however, Kuhn says government representatives had
shifted to a more subtle exercise of power, "coopting rather than
controlling the media." Although he may have been a bit indulgent of the
Socialists' motivations during the Mitterrand years, his knowledge of the
French political landscape makes him the perfect guide through the
tumultuous transformations that have taken place in France's contemporary
media. This well written work, by an author with a passion for his
subject, will remain the English language reference on the French media
for some time.
Alvi McWilliams, media researcher
Paris, France
Hilliard, Robert L., and Michael C. Keith. 1996.
_Global Broadcasting Systems_.
Boston: Focal Press. vi+218 pp.
As a comparativist of long standing, I am delighted to witness the
outpouring of comparative studies of broadcasting systems: dozens of
titles in English, French, German and other languages over the past 10
years. Some of the works are general, while others focus on specific
forms of broadcasting (political, soap operas, etc.) or specific regions
of the world (Europe, the Arab World, etc.). However, it's rare to find a
work that takes the entire broadcasting world as its subject, and rarer
still to see such a work aimed particularly at undergraduate students --
or so I surmise from this volume's brevity, the almost-complete absence
of footnotes or endnotes and the direct, sometimes colloquial, prose style.
Hilliard and Keith are professors of communication, the former at Emerson
College and the latter at Boston College. Each has written other books
about broadcasting, but none focuses on broadcast systems in other
countries. First-hand observation and interviews inform their
presentation from time to time, but the bulk of the data used for _Global
Broadcasting Systems_ appears to come from other works, primarily
scholarly books in English. Thus, the book is more a compilation of
existing work than it is an original study. The organizational framework
is topical, with separate chapters on the world telecommunications
revolution, an overview of systems, control and regulation, financing,
programming, freedom of speech and external services. Each chapter is
subdivided by geographical area. There is neither a summary chapter nor
individual chapters containing summaries; as a result, there are very few
detailed comparisons, or explanations of reasons for similarities and
differences among systems.
The book's title should be taken quite literally in one sense: there is
little here about cable, satellite and VCR. Furthermore, the focus is
almost entirely on national systems, whether commercial or otherwise. The
authors neglect most forms of regional and local broadcasting, ethnic and
linguistic minority broadcasting, etc. Their treatment is considerably
more specific with respect to regulation and structure than to
programming practices, where percentages and categories dominate and
description is minimal.
If we may assume that the limitations just described stem from a
self- or publisher-imposed page limit, the authors actually manage to
cover a lot of ground here, and students could come away from reading the
book with a fair sense of the overall shape of dozens of broadcast
systems. In fact, "shape" implies a possible rounding off, and that is
the predominant characteristic of _Global Broadcasting Systems_. A
rounded-off picture may suffice for many student readers. In turn,
however, that deprives those readers of the opportunity to learn that
many nations now have relatively robust sub-systems serving minorities:
Sami (Lapp) radio across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland; national
broadcast news services for Maori listeners in New Zealand and for Native
American listeners in the United States, not to mention a number of
majority culture listeners in both cases; Irish and Welsh language radio
and TV services in Ireland and Wales, and Basque language radio and TV
for the Basque region of Spain; Aboriginal-owned and -operated radio and
TV stations in Australia. Such services raise many interesting questions
that are basic to a consideration of broadcasting's role in society,
among them the issue of whether they promote inter- societal harmony or
lead to divisions in society.
Some of the rounding-off actually provides a distorted picture. For
example, the book describes Germany as having been divided into
broadcasting regions after World War II -- south, west, north, east, and
Berlin -- which is accurate where the Allied military zones of occupation
are concerned, but misses the important fact that the Western Allies soon
made the individual West German states (laender), and not the federal
government, the sovereign controlling agencies for broadcasting. That is
a highly unusual structural approach, and it also explains much about
political influence in German broadcasting. The activities of the new
private radio and television stations in Russia go almost unmentioned,
yet the attempts made by some of them to establish a tradition of
critical journalism are well worth noting when discussing how difficult
it has been for broadcasting in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern
Europe to shake off the totalitarian bonds of the Communist past. And,
while the authors note the need for the Arab states to cooperate in
producing and exchanging TV programs, they do not note the many past
attempts to do so, or why those attempts quickly failed.
And then there are the outright errors. Germany's external broadcasting
service, the Deutsche Welle, is described as being built into "an
ice-covered alp," whereas its real home is much farther north, in
Cologne, and built on the site of a pig wallow. The Japanese public
broadcasting service, NHK, does not rely on the government for its annual
budget, but instead itself collects the annual license fee, which is set
by the government. [The authors state (p. 104) that the NHK "has been
reluctant" to raise fees!] Dutch broadcasting's "pillar" approach,
according to the authors, leads to many different types and formats of
programming, rather than the U.S. "block" scheduling. That was true up
until the mid-1980s, but has been less and less true ever since, as
commercial imperatives loom larger.
The text is illustrated by a number of figures (charts, schedules, etc.),
but many of them add little to the narrative, and some appear to have no
relation to it. Figure 4.8, for example, shows NHK's global relay system,
whereas the text reference for that figure deals with Japan's dual system
of financial support. Figure 4.10 covers New Zealand's advertising
standards; the text reference is to advertising income and capital for
new stations. Figure 5.2 displays a French radio schedule, but even a
Frenchman would be hard pressed to see just how it illustrates the
authors' contention that "call-in formats are popular" (p.123). In a
similar vein, I am not sure just why four of the chapters have the
appendices that they do: why are Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and
RFE-RL-VOA accorded this special treatment?
Despite all of its faults, this book might be of value in teaching a
course where world broadcast systems were covered in a single unit. It
does provide a compact, readable, yet geographically comprehensive,
introduction to the subject. A well- prepared instructor could fill in
the more important gaps and correct the more glaring errors. But it
really is a shame that an instructor would have to go to such effort in
the first place.
Donald R. Browne, professor
Department of Speech-Communication
University of Minnesota
Tiffin, John, and Lalita Rajasingham. 1995.
_In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society_.
London and New York: Routledge. xviii+204pp.
This book is a curious combination of analysis and speculation. Of its 10
chapters, Chapters 2 through 6 present a relatively sober account of
education as a communications process, the failures of the current
educational practice, and the history of computer-mediated learning. The
rest of the book is a vision based on wildly inflated projections of
computer technology.
In Chapter 1, the authors present their utopian scenario for education in
the 21st century. Their heroine Shirley puts on a datasuit and a
head-mounted display and goes "off to school": she enters a virtual
reality in which she can attend any class at any time, avail herself of a
virtual library or health service, or even visit the Franz Josef glacier
on a flying motorcycle. At the end of the scenario, we are told that
"[e]verything that has been described is technically feasible within the
next ten years." (p. 15)
This is simply not the case. In a decade, research laboratories with
expensive machines and screens may be achieving photorealistic computer
animation; home computers will not. And even when photorealism is achieved
on high quality videoscreens, it will not easily be reproduced in the
head-mounted displays of virtual reality. There is also the problem of
tracking the head and body movements of the user. All methods of tracking
suffer from latency effects, which can result in "simulator sickness."
Shirley may find herself vomiting in reality as she hovers over the
virtual Franz Josef glacier. Most VR systems only track the head and a
few other points; full datasuits with force feedback are not likely.
Finally, the authors seem to think that all this virtual information can
be transmitted to millions of home users on an expanded Internet. The
combination of these obstacles means that there is little likelihood that
the authors' virtual classroom can be widely available in the next few
decades.
Clearly, the authors have accepted uncritical predictions for progress in
computer graphics, yet technological optimism is not the book's most
serious flaw. The authors have also fundamentally misunderstood the nature
of representation. They write:
"Words, whether they are spoken or written, are a way by which virtual
realities can be generated and they are the principal way of generating
virtual realities in conventional education. Here is a virtual reality
programmed in words by Robert Graves: ... Graves is a brilliant poet
because with extraordinary economy of words he can generate very powerful
virtual realities in many, though not all people. Reflected light carries
a pattern of black and white from a book to the eyes of a reader and
stimulates the proximal receptors at the back of the eye. Through a
mechanism not properly understood [!], the pattern is perceived as words
and pulls images and perhaps sound and even smell out of long-term memory
and into conscious thought and sensation. This triggers the brain of the
reader to generate a virtual reality. / Contrast the virtual reality
Graves encoded in text with the virtual reality programmed by the
nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérome... You can enter
Gérome's virtual reality and imagine what is happening, identify with the
dramatis personae and think about what you would do..../ Television uses
light and sound to transmit virtual realities that are even more explicit,
because they have continuity and sound and replicate reality in a
convincing manner .... As in books, what happens is prescribed. Contrast
this with the dynamic, interactive, fully immersive virtual realities that
can be generated by toys, games, and music." (pp. 131-133)
In this extraordinary passage, virtual reality becomes a metaphor for all
forms of representation: perceptual illusion becomes the goal of
representation. Verbal texts are merely scripts by which we play virtual
reality movies in our heads. The ideal text is transparent, a window
through which we can see the represented world. Television is better at
achieving this transparency. Better still, in immersive computer graphics
we can fly through the window into the represented world. The authors seem
to forget that words (and numbers) participate in a system of arbitrary
symbols that functions on a representational plane different from images.
This rejection of arbitrary symbols is important for education, because
Western education has been defined in terms of books and the arbitrary
symbols they contain. Few may fall quite as completely as the authors
have done for the utopian promises of virtual reality and artificial
intelligence. However, many writers on educational technology do seem to
accept the notion that education should be perceptual rather than
symbolic. They assume that the best computer-mediated education is not
provided by programs that confront students with symbolic structures, but
instead by programs that come as close as possible to perceptual
"reality." Simulation is very popular among educational technologists, who
often speak, as the authors do here, as if computer graphics were an
unmediated presentation of visual reality. For them, education through
computer graphics approximates the ideal of direct contact.
Yet education by direct contact is in and of itself not education at all.
It is the systems of mediation (the languages of literature, mathematics,
the social sciences, and so on) that have historically constituted
education. And one cannot learn in any of these fields by playing virtual
movies in one's head. The student has to confront these systems as
systems. At the same time, the student has to learn how these systems
relate to perceived reality. A geologist has to see rocks erode in the
field as well as understanding the chemistry of erosion. Electronic media
allow us to revise the balance between the symbolic and the perceptual in
education.
So the new media will indeed affect education in the developed countries.
Immersive virtual reality will probably play a minor role, because it is
so technologically intractable. However, digital video and computer
graphics seem destined to have a greater impact. The question is not
whether Shirley will inhabit a virtual class in the year 2010. It is
whether educational philosophy and practice can establish a new
equilibrium between symbolic representation and perceptual presentation.
Jay David Bolter, professor
School of Literature, Communication and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
Tseelon, Efrat. 1995.
_The Masque of Femininity_.
London: SAGE Publications. 152pp.
In 135 pages of text, Efrat Tseelon's six reference-packed chapters take
the reader swiftly through five paradoxes surrounding the concept of
femininity in Western culture: modesty, duplicity, visibility, beauty and
death. By comparison, Naomi Wolf required nearly 350 pages to explore
just one of Tseelon's paradoxes in her 1991 book, _The Beauty Myth_.
The book's final chapter explores the meaning of fashion in a postmodern
society.
Tseelon's work emanates from her psychology dissertation research and her
personal interest in the topic. It touches upon myriad theoretical
frameworks and cultural domains. Throughout the book, she attempts to
bridge the gap between empiricism and critical feminist analysis. Tseelon
says most studies of the gendered construction of appearance and self fail
to incorporate both of these traditions. She describes the approach she
uses throughout the book as "creative critical analysis" framed largely in
cultural psychology (p.2).
The first chapter deals with the modesty paradox: "the woman is
constructed as seduction -- to be ever punished for it" (p. 5). Tseelon
develops three themes: the _first_ woman myth, the processes that define a
woman by appearance, and the link between female modesty in dress and male
anxieties about women. Next is the duplicity paradox in which "woman is
constructed as artifice, and marginalised for lacking essence and
authenticity"(p. 5). This chapter explores how femininity serves as a
mask or masquerade concealing the authentic woman. It draws from Erving
Goffman's metaphor that social life is modeled on drama ( p. 40) and the
author's own research in the late 1980s with readers of British women's
magazines. The chapter contrasts the author's findings with theoretical
perspectives on impression management, i.e., sincere or insincere
presentation of self. Tseelon argues that women are concerned about
appearance for multiple, complex, even dialectic reasons, not necessarily
for false, manipulative or deceptive reasons (p. 53).
Visibility, in which "the woman is constructed as a spectacle while being
culturally invisible" (p. 5), is the paradox Tseelon explores in the
third chapter. She examines feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's
concept of the "cinematic gaze" in which she argues that a male
perspective has constructed the female image in movies ( p. 67) and
includes a wide range of other theorists' views (e.g., psychoanalytic,
symbolic interactionist) defining masculinity. She finds the equation of
"gaze" solely with a masculine power perspective as problematic. She
argues that the "actress is in fact a metaphor ... for the common situation
of women in Western culture; culturally invisible yet physically visible
-- always on stage" (p. 75).
The paradox of beauty, in which "the woman embodies ugliness while
signifying beauty" (p. 5), is the topic for the fourth chapter. In it,
Tseelon argues that beauty is the outcome of male fear of _Woman_
projected onto individual women. As she states in the chapter's
conclusion: "Could the fear of ugliness of the woman be ... a projection
of the ugliness of the man?" (p. 99). To be sure, Tseelon has been
building up to this point through the first three chapters, but it's a
complicated theory that needs support from a wide range of sociological,
psychological and historical perspectives. She fills the chapter with such
references, adds interesting anecdotal evidence from cosmetic surgery
reports, and concludes by using the metaphor of the prostitute as evidence
of the stigma of beauty and male fear of female sexual independence.
The fifth paradox deals with death: "the woman signifies death as well as
defence against it" (p. 6). From Tseelon's cultural psychological
perspective, "death and beauty are two sides of the same coin" (p. 101).
In this chapter, she examines attitudes of death throughout history,
Freud's theories on death, and even ties in the popularity of tattooing
and body piercing. The concluding chapter is wide-ranging and moves into
an exploration of postmodernism and clothed meaning, i.e., fashion.
As the author acknowledges in the introduction, the strength of this
volume rests with its comprehensive review of the literature on how "woman
presents herself in Western culture" (p. 1). This reviewer often found
herself needing to stop in mid-paragraph to contemplate fully the
implications of a sentence or to digest the author's interpretation of a
theory, a historic event or current cultural practice. As one example,
she gives a three-sentence explanation of how one can see Joan of Arc's
refusal to wear female clothes during her imprisonment by the English can
as confirming women's essential flaw: they are agents of the devil (p.
15). This historical example appears within the modesty paradox chapter
that starts with examples of Eve, Pandora and Lilith. However, it
required a significant leap of understanding for this feminist reviewer.
The link between Joan of Arc's action and the religious accounts of first
women was new to this reader. Several paragraphs -- even pages -- of
explanation, would have made the relationship easier to understand. This
example may appear trivial, but it points to the fact that Tseelon could
easily expand each of the chapters into book-length treatises.
Those immersed in the literature cited throughout Tseelon's book may find it
a rare gift. It ties many theoretical traditions together and brings new
perspectives to the five paradoxes -- modesty, duplicity, visibility,
beauty and death -- that Tseelon's combines to form the masque of
femininity. However, it is deceptive in its brevity. It is definitely
not a book for the uninitiated or one that a reader can digest properly
in a single reading.
Pamela J. Creedon, director and professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Kent State University
Zoonen, Liesbet van. 1994.
_Feminist Media Studies_.
London: SAGE Publications. vi+173 pp.
True or false? The media exploit women. The portrayal of women in the
media is oppressive. An increase in female professional communicators
will lessen stereotyped images of women in media content. Patriarchal
media institutions produce univocal, sexist content.
If you answered true to any of these statements, you likely are not alone
for such is the conventional wisdom regarding the media and their role in
the oppression of women and which, in her book, _Feminist Media Studies_,
Liesbet van Zoonen so aptly debunks. Moreover, Zoonen's comprehensive
work provides readers with an introduction to recent feminist media theory
and research as she explores the relationship between culture, media and
gender.
In the introductory chapter, Zoonen, a 35-year-old assistant professor of
communications at the University of Amsterdam, positions the importance of
this book -- indeed the study of feminism -- firmly in the social and
cultural milieu of contemporary First World societies, which are saturated
with struggles relating to gender issues. (She also notes the dearth of
material from Third World and Communist countries in a research community
dominated by white male scientists.) Lacking any one dominant theory in
feminist research, Zoonen adapts Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model to
her analysis. The model provides a framework as the author examines the
multiple roles of the media in the construction of gender and as she
analyzes the subjective perspective of audiences in their own production
of meaning.
Chapter 2 ("'New' Themes") reviews a number of salient issues in feminist
media theory and research. It also anchors feminist media critique to the
academic disciplines of communications theory and cultural studies. This
section also begins the author's examination of the fallacies of the
transmission communications model, which scholars frequently use to explain
media effects. For example, Zoonen notes that pornography studies
typically anger feminists because they assume that pornography influences
male behavior by encouraging and legitimizing violence against women. In
pornography research (and other media effects research), Zoonen argues
that people erroneously depict media as agents of social control assuming
that audiences compose of passive individuals who are immersed in the
content and who are incapable of forming their own opinions and/or
controlling their own actions.
Building on this concept, Zoonen gets to the crux of her analysis in
Chapter 3 ("A 'New' Paradigm?"), where she examines numerous
misconceptions underlying traditional feminist theoretical themes. For
example, people often conceptualize gender as a more or less stable and
easily identifiable distinction between women and men -- an assumption
that "denies the dynamic nature of gender, its historical and cultural
specificity and its contradictory meanings" (p. 31). Instead, the notion
of gender should encompass human subjectivity and refrain from depicting
women as victims who are being acted upon (as so many earlier models have
done). Along these lines, Zoonen suggests that one should view gender
as a particular discourse that comprises a set of "overlapping and
often contradictory cultural descriptions and prescriptions" (p. 33)
regarding sexual difference -- all of which arise from and regulate such
non-discursive constructs including the economic, social, political and
technological.
Chapter 4 ("Media Production and the Encoding of Gender") examines the
contradictions and tensions within the media production process. Here
Zoonen's key concern is that much of the research has over-emphasized the
role of individual communicators while it has downplayed organizational
influences. Further, by ignoring other prominent discourses (such as
race, class and sexuality) such research concentrates too much upon the
interests of middle class women who represent dominant ethnic groups from
Western industrialized countries.
Chapter 5 ("Media Texts and Gender") serves as an overview of two research
methodologies commonly used in analyzing media texts: content analysis and
semiotic analysis (from the literature of gender in advertising). While
Zoonen finds content analysis an appropriate methodology for providing a
general impression on an issue when other research is scarce, for the
theoretical perspective advanced in the book, she recommends the semiotic
approach.
In Western patriarchal culture, the media display women as spectacles
to be looked upon by the male audience. In Chapter 6 ("Spectatorship and the
Gaze"), Zoonen examines research on this phenomenon especially from feminist
film studies literature. Her conclusion: many studies, especially those from
the area of psychoanalysis, deny the possibilities of the female gaze, female
voyeurism, female pleasure.
In her review of television soap and romance-novel reception analysis in
Chapter 7 ("Gender and Media Reception"), Zoonen suggests that studies
which focus mainly on the "politics of pleasure" trivialize critical
feminist discussion. Moreover, she says that many of the issues raised
through her theoretical perspective remain unanswered. For example, is
gender constructed in only "women's media"? The author also cautions that
by elevating gender to the overriding dimension of human identity, the
research ignores the possible intervention of other constructs.
Zoonen suggest how one can use interpretative research methods in a manner
consistent with the book's theoretical perspective in Chapter 8 ("Research
Methods"). An expansive discussion, Zoonen's main contribution here is a
compelling argument for a shift in the conceptualization of gender.
Indeed, instead of operationalizing gender as an independent variable (as
so much of the research does), Zoonen conceptualizes gender as the
dependent variable: "a process and a product of social interaction and
power relations" (p. 131).
_Feminist Media Studies_ provides a synthesis of a wide range of
feminist media research. All-encompassing also is the author's intended
audience -- researchers, teachers, students in women's studies and media or
communications departments. And therein lies a weakness of the book. It is
perhaps an attempt at being too many things to too many disparate groups of
readers. The scope of subject matter and the complex concepts covered in fewer
than 200 pages render the book unwieldy at times, certainly beyond the grasp of
many undergraduate students. On the other hand, the book succeeds on two
important counts: Zoonen skillfully presents ideas that bridge the empirical
world to the realities of both journalism and the women's movement. Further,
Zoonen's theoretical viewpoint empowers audiences in the meaning-producing
process, which, in her words, "opens up new possibilities for feminist media
politics" (p. 154).
Carol S. Lomicky, assistant professor
Department of Journalism/Mass Communications
University of Nebraska at Kearney