How Media Have Represented Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Class, and Sexuality, Essay Example

The importance of analyzing how the media creates various representations of race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality lies in its contribution to an understanding of how the latter phenomena are produced by various societal mechanisms. This implies that such phenomena are the direct result of such societal mechanisms, like the media, and not the products of a rigorous scientific reflection. When performing this type of analysis, the theoretician can construe that the classifications inherent to these phenomena are essentially relative, insofar as particular forms of media play a vital role in constituting how the common person thinks about race/ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality. Moreover, such an analysis allows one to understand how media re-enforces and perpetuates stereotypes within a society, stereotypes, which Degiuli notes entail “an attempt to fix meaning to certain types of groups.” (Degiuli, Media and the Margins)

One of the means to understand how the media affects these social outlooks is to consider common stereotypes and prejudices that may be prevalent within any given society. For example, in a discussion of the notion of race in America, Ralph Ellison notes that, “the fantasy of an America free of blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society.” (Ellison) Thus, one of the dominant ideological “fantasies”, as Ellison phrases it, of American society is that of a black-free America. Ellison’s word choice is striking here, as it precisely emphasizes the idea of “fantasy”: what Ellison is alluding to is some type of ideological impulse that creates such thoughts, and therefore, Ellision emphasizes the difference between such fantasies and reality.

In the context of our question of the importance of analyzing media, it is therefore pertinent to understand how such a fantasy gains acceptance within a particular culture through the media. Certainly, the media may be understood as an apparatus that itself creates meaning and consensus between members of a communal group.  This influence of the media is most prominent in what the academic literature terms “mass-mediated culture”, in which media plays a dominant role in forming the communal norms of a given society. As Degiuli defines the notion of “mass-mediated culture”, the latter consists of “a culture in which the mass media play a key role in both shaping and creating cultural perceptions.” (Degiuli, The Role of Mass Media) Thus, when considering a mass-media culture’s importance to the formation of cultural perceptions, one can see how this corresponds to the formation of perceptions regarding phenomena such as race, class, gender, etc., The media can easily create a particular perception regarding a certain group that becomes accepted as a cultural norm. This influence of the media can be considered to be dangerous, insofar as one begins to question the motives of why the media wishes to promote particular perceptions of certain groups. In essence, the media becomes a totally arbitrary dispenser of identity that can demonize or marginalize various groups according to a haphazard and contingent logic, which may be governed by entirely private interests.

With these remarks from the academic literature in mind, we can begin to further understand the importance of analyzing the media. The media can clearly create images, stereotypes and prejudices of various groups; moreover, with the media’s perpetuation of this type of thought, within the mass-mediated society it becomes more difficult to create new perspectives, which can alter common and flawed conceptions. For example, Jurgen Habermas warns of the threat of mass media to autonomous perceptions and thought. Degiuli summarizes that Habermas “argued that the spread of the ‘culture industry’ through mass media with its unsophisticated and standardized products, will undermine the capacity of individuals for critical and independent thought.” (Degiuli, The Role of Mass Media) Thus, according to Habermas, the importance in analyzing the media lies not only in an understanding of how the media creates various identities, but through the very act of analyzing the media itself, one begins to exercise their own “critical and independent thought.” That is to say, when one begins to break from the dominant perspective as perpetuated by a mass-media culture, the act of this break itself is significant to creating new possible perspectives on social groups, while also creating an understanding of the media as not only transmitting various perspectives, but as a device that actively shapes public opinion.

Hence, it is precisely by examining how the media creates these social constructs that the theorist can begin to deconstruct these social identities and understand their origin as not natural, but as particular and tied to a specific cultural or historical context. In other words, tasks such as media analysis provide a radical re-interpretation of some of the commonly held “folk-beliefs” within a society, and as such, enables the possibility for the creation of new identities, ones that are not determined by prejudicial or stereotypical discourses that influence a society. In this regard, the analysis of media is a type of critique that functions to liberate society from its over-burdened negative concepts, which tend to marginalize groups by ascribing them with identities according to ultimately imaginary phenomena such as race, gender, and class. These ideas are precisely imaginary because they are the product of a particular culture, and only reflect the opinions of the dominant societal group, and not the true “identity” of the marginalized groups in question.