Table of Content
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| What is representation? |
| Questions of representation |
| Representations and gender |
| Representations and the real |
| Questions of positive and negative images |
| Reflection |
What is representation?
Representation is about:
• how social groups, different subcultures, occupations, ages, social classes and places are portrayed in the media
• how audiences interpret these portrayals. Most academic work on representation has focused on gender and race.
Representation is concerned with the way in which the world, or some part of it, is portrayed in a media product. This is an enormous area of discussion and argument in media studies. The representation debate focuses repeatedly on certain questions, including:
• What are the representations of a subject that are repeated in different products?
• What is the truth or otherwise of these cliches?
• What are their effects, if any?
• Does the audience see through them?
• What are the factors which 'explain' the representations which are selected and how they are put together?
• How are people portrayed in large social groupings (e.g. by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic class)?
• Where are you represented in media products in terms of the type of person you are?
The word 'representation' implies that people are being re-presented by the media to others and to themselves. So in the case of women, for example, some argue that if images presented by the media concentrate on physical attractiveness, this reinforces sexism by encouraging us to think that the way women look is more important than what they do. This affects our attitudes to others and how we think of our own bodies and personalities.
The 'media play a part in the constant development of our identities. Our experience of the media offers us a wide range of models of behaviour and attitudes which we can copy or reject. We can become imaginatively involved in characters in a broadcast drama so that we understand their thoughts, actions and points of view. We can identify with famous people portrayed in the press and want to be more like them. We can recognise certain social or group characteristics and want to adopt or modify them.
Questions of representation
'Representation', a rich term with several related meanings.
• It emphasises that, however realistic or plausible media images seem, they never simply present the world direct. They are always a construction, a representation, not a transparent window on to the real.
• It also signals the way some media re-present certain events, stories etc. over and over again, and rend to marginalise or even exclude others, and thereby make them unfamiliar or even threatening.
The media give us ways of imagining particular situations, identities and groups. These imaginings exist materially, as industries which employ people, and can also have material effects on how people experience the world, and how they in turn get understood, or legislated for, or perhaps beaten up in the street by others.
Studies of representation which deal with the selective portrayal of people in terms of character 'types' usually lead on to the theory of 'stereotypes'. A stereotype is the selection of certain characteristics to define a subject or a person, although the selection simplifies and/ or distorts, and falls far short of a complete or true picture. This selective picture is repeated in many media texts,and thus becomes instantly recognisable to audiences. It should be emphasised that stereotyping is a theory, not a fact, and that it can only be used to describe part of how representation may work. Media representations change over time. For example, you may find representations of working-class people in older films patronising and stereotypical in ways that would no longer be 'allowed' today. If you look at representations of gender you will still find traditional stereotypes such as the 'dumb blonde'. However, pressures of changing social attitudes and feminism mean that representations of the female gender are more diverse than they used to be, and are avoiding or reworking some of the traditional stereotypes.
Stereotyping in this context has been a key issue. It raises such questions as:
• Do the media, in the identities and understandings they so powerfully circulate, suggest to large audiences that x or y character is typical of that group, and therefore that the whole group should be viewed in certain ways?
• Are these ways best described as negative?
• How does the relationship between media images and particular groups or identities get changed?
Representations and gender
The distinction between sex and gender is still very useful. Sex in this context is not the same as sexuality. Sex: difference refers here to the division of people into male and female, depending on physical characteristics: sex organs, hormonal make-up and so on. Gender differences are culturally formed. They exist on the basis of the biological, 'the body', but build a huge system of differentiation over and above it. So whereas your sex will determine broadly whether or not you can bear a child, for example, gender based arguments have insisted that because women bear children, therefore they should be the ones to stay at home and bring them up.
Some of these assumptions are circulated through the media, and feminist positions keen to challenge them have developed key approaches to representation. Content analysis is a valuable starting point. It tries to assess the frequency with which a certain carefully chosen category appears in media texts. Such studies of gender roles in magazines and advertising, show that women are still represented according to long-standing cultural stereotypes.
In altering how gender difference is presented, a basic assumption of quantitative approaches can imply that more images of a particular group are needed; then that what are needed are more realistic portrayals since the media are said to reflect society, and such reflections should always be accurate. This raises questions such as:
• Might wider structures of economic and political power make it arguably 'realistic' to show more women than men active in the home, for example?
• How do different genres affect these imaginings? What of the needs of comedy or fantasy for example?
• Is it only irrational or ignorant prejudice that accounts for stereotyping?
• Is it true that the media have huge powers all on their own to socialise people into beliefs, roles and behaviour? There is plenty of evidence that people are not always successfully socialised in this way.
Representations and the real
Calls for 'realism' or positive images of disadvantaged groups can ignore the ways that media texts do not have a straightforward relationship to the rest of the real. To say that a media text is 'distorted' or 'unrepresentative' may ignore the following points:
• It is a representation in the other sense of the word: a construction with its own formal rules and fascinations. It therefore needs to work differently with different materials: time-based film and television, with their ability to stage action forms.
• Its images may belong to a genre which is nor experienced by audiences in the same way as, say, the news. Audiences’ degree of familiarity with a genre's conventions is important for its 'reality effect': in action adventure genres, violence, for example, may be taken for granted as 'staged', as needed to dramatise the story. It may therefore be difficult to 'read off it' implications for masculine identities. In news or children's fictions violence may however be deeply disturbing, because there it is seen as more closely related to the real world. Conversely it seems that soaps, for all their reputation as 'unrealistic', can treat certain issues (such as rape, or traumatisation after military service) vividly through the way the issue persists as a problem in the long term, sometimes over years.
• The idea of reflection is far too straightforward and mirror-like, especially for fantasy forms. It suggests there is a fairly simple thing called 'reality' to be 'reflected' in a one-to-one, undistorted way, whereas some forms, such as comedy, have been argued to depend on the exaggerations of stereotyping, understood playfully by audiences.
After the release of Star Wars Episode One: Phantom Menace (US 1999), there were heated and fascinating debates over the allegations that some of the characters were negatively stereotyped, especially Jar Jar Binks (said to be an offensive caricatures of Caribbean, Jamaican or Aftican-American culture, interestingly through the construction of the voice) and the Meimoidians, said to be negatively stereotyped as 'Japanese'.
Questions of positive and negative images
History suggests that, once an oppressed group, such as women or 'black' people, perceives its political and social oppression, it begins to try to change that oppression at the level of representation. After struggling sometimes for simple visibility, it will then often try to replace ‘negative’ with 'positive' images. This, however, is a complex process, involving the following areas:
• debates around how to define the 'community' being represented
• questions of what is to count as 'positive' representations
• the effect of employment practices in the media on such images
• the differences that the understandings of different audiences will make to the meanings of certain kinds of images, including genre competence, religious beliefs etc.
Groups that are heavily stereotyped (as 'problems') are likely to have less access to influential positions in the media, or to other kinds of power. This can set up a vicious circle of unemployment. There may also be few images or stories that centre on them sympathetically. This may be the result of violent historical processes, including wars or colonialism, which have left a long legacy of trivialising or insulting images. In the case of asylum seekers it may even be the case that they dare not be photographed or quoted by name, for fear of reprisals in their homelands.
When images of the group do begin to be produced, they have to bear what has been called the burden of representation. This involves questions such as:
• What is taken to be the (enormous) group which is the object of representation?
• What 'reality' is being represented?
• For groups such as women, or 'British-Asians', which members of the group are doing the defining of 'the community'? Or of defining what is positive and what is negative about an image' To imply that 'British-Asian' is a homogeneous group, all sharing the same experiences of age, class, religion, and so on, is clearly foolish.
• There is also the question of how to construct characters belonging to the group (particularly visible in the case of skin colour) if they have been relatively absent from media images previously. This can mean that they are now often read as 'representing' the whole community.
For many years there were very few images of black British people on television, and those images which did exist were of blacks as 'problems' or (more sympathetic, if patronising) as 'victims'. When black characters did appear, they were often felt to need to 'stand in for' or represent the whole of their particular 'community'. These 'positive' images sometimes produced characterisations of strict parents, near-noble teachers and so on- clearly a narrowing of the range of representation compared to the roles available to white characters. As a result, some members of such groups felt that being represented in various and ordinary, even 'negative' ways would be a positive step.
'Negative' images are not always best opposed by (someone's idea of) 'positive', but by the availability of a range of fuller ways of being imagined. This is arguably easier in a soap opera than in a feature film , and is certainly easier when plenty of the group in question are employed in the meaning-making industries.
It seems there is no such thing as the '100 per cent right on text' or 'positive image' which will guarantee to change audiences in progressive ways all on its own. Texts have always to be understood in the context of audience formations and understandings, power structures and production practices. Fictional and other entertainment forms in particular have an extremely complex relationship to audiences' sense of the real.
Reflection
After my research into representation I have a better understanding of the term itself and its concepts relating to media products. It also have a developed knowledge of the arguments and debates surrounding the term and how critics review representation within the industry itself. Furthermore I now or understand how the imagery offsetting characters and groups within media can be reflected in a positive and negative way but also how a positive image and can be received as a negative image to our individual.
This concept is an important one for me to take forward into my pre-production, production and post-production phases as the characters that I will be representing should be a re-presentation of society. However I need to understand that my re-presentation of certain groups and individuals will be affected by the audience, the genre I will choose, the ideologies that I want to portray, and then narrative that my short film holds.
References:
Books:
Nicholas, J., Price, J. (1998). Advanced Studies in Media. Nelson
Branston, G., Staffordd, R. (2006). The Media Student's Book. Routledge
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