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Gender & the Media
R. Gill

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How have advertisers responded to feminism? What should we make of the popularity of 'lad mags'? Is news a gendered product? Are men's bodies - as much as women's - now objectified in the media? Do shows like "Oprah" or "Jerry Springer" redraw the boundary between public and private? Is chick lit rewriting the romance? These are just some of the questions addressed in "Gender and the Media". Written in a clear and accessible style, with lots of examples from Anglo-American media, the book offers a critical introduction to the study of gender in the media, and an up-to-date assessment of the key issues and debates. Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessment, "Gender and the Media" explores the contradictory character of contemporary gender representations, which sees confident expressions of girl power sitting alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among young women; moral panics about the impact on men of idealised representations of the 'sixpack' but near silence about the pervasive re-sexualisation of women's bodies; and the growing use of irony and playfulness that render critique extremely difficult. The book looks in-depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the 21st century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique. "Gender and the Media" is also concerned with the theoretical tools available for analysing representations. A range of approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory is discussed, and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash, and positive images are for making sense of gender in today's Western media. Finally, "Gender and the Media" also raises questions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critique and intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotation marks seem to protect much media content from criticism and when much media content - from "Sex and the City" to revenge adverts - can be labelled postfeminist.