Gender in the News Flashcards
Newsworthiness
What makes a story worth telling, it is socially constructed & subjective as it is usually constructed by white, western, heteronormative, middle class men & represents what is important to them. Should be spatial (close by) and culturally meaningful. “Better” with shock value - more outrageous the story the better. What media thinks society wants to hear.
Aboriginal Women (25-44) are _ times as likely to experience a violent death
5
Hierarchy of Female Victims
Who is a good victim/bad victim: deserved it/didn’t deserve it – Aboriginal women being at the bottom of the hierarchy signals that they are easily brutalized because they are so readily dismissed – creates a cycle, inattention to aboriginal women’s victimization is reinforced by lack of coverage
“Good Victims”
Good = Innocent and worth saving, associated with passivity, monogamy and fragility they obey and therefore did not deserve this (White femininity as an ideology the pre-packages racial women as bad) → Middle class white women are good and racialized others are bad. These binaries develop in the context of each other, they reproduce hegemonic assumptions about acceptable/deviant expressions of femininity. Encourages valuing some lives & not others while justifying oppression, devalued women make White womanhood possible
“Bad Victims”
Bad = unworthy and beyond redemption. This is deeply tied to race & class.
Differential treatment of Missing Women
Poor/racialized women are seen as blameworthy for their crimes compared to white women → if a victim deviates from patriarchal notions of appropriate feminine behaviour by drinking/dressing provocatively/doing drugs she is at least partially responsible (seen especially in prostitutes), racialized (especially aboriginals) are stigmatized as prostitutes, street people or addicts even if they are not which also justifies crimes against them/determines whether they are reported
Content Analysis as a Research method
Both qualitative/interpretive and quantitative. Quantitative looks only at # of times victims are mentioned, # of articles about them and placement of articles. Qualitative is used to supplement – seeks to understand the subtle meanings and implications of the texts and is considered a more holistic approach to understanding context and content. – mostly headlines, articles, photographs, and language
White Women = “Girl’s Next Door”
Aboriginal Women = invisible “Others”
Articles are more in depth about personal traits, qualities, hobbies of white women to make them relatable to readers – people who shared their (white) hopes and dreams, the same portrayals are not made of Aboriginal women, they had superficial details that would not relate them to the community.
Imagined Community
Our imagined community is haunted by colonial, racist, sexist and classist ideologies. “News performs the role of “the bard” (Shakespeare) – news is a storyteller. It’s about myth, news tells the story of a nation, of a group of people contained in a boundary, it tells us who we are together
- Now that we get news from farther away we imagine ourselves as one big community
Symbolic Annihilation
Exclusion, trivialization, marginalization or missing/murdered indigenous women ( all women, but some more than others ). Contributes to Aboriginal women’s unequal treatment in other societal domains further entrenching it
Main Points of “Newsworthy Victims?” by Gilchrist
Looking at the amount of Aboriginal women who have gone missing, how/if it is investigated, how this stacks up to white women disappearing. What does representation in the media convey about victims? What does it say about our social structure and our perceptions of others?
Differential Treatment in Coverage, Placement, Headlines, Articles, Tone/Themes, Photos, Messages of Resistance
→ Media representation/interest varies on the woman’s background
→ Aboriginal women were mentioned significantly less, had fewer articles with fewer words, were mentioned less in the press, their articles were hidden or amongst meaningless stories while white women made the front page, their headlines were detached while white women’s included their names
→ Both received “good victim” coverage but was amplified for white women
→ Many large and central images for white women: them with their families, police officers looking, maps and suspect sketches. Photographs of Aboriginal women were smaller, less intimate which doesn’t allow readers to become emotionally invested
→ Lots of resistance and opposition to the different representation of Aboriginal women by their families/communities
Dualisms
Of Indigenous Women: “Indian Princess” on one side and “squaw” on the other
Victim Blaming (like in sexual assault)
Women involved in the drug or sex trade are deemed bad victims (they did things to deserve victimization), A white women’s experience of violence is understood in a very different way because it is listened to and taken seriously
Intersectionality
all young Canadians, all attended school or had jobs, all had close connections with family or friends, most married or had children, were not believed to be runaways, didn’t have connections with the sex industry, all have similarities, Similar Class/Gender/Age, only difference here was Race.
