Sexuality Flashcards
Not integrated…
Batchelor found that being gay was not generally integrated into mainstream media representations.
Rather, when it did appear, e.g. in television drama, it was represented mainly as a source of anxiety or embarrassment, or it was seen as a target for teasing and bullying.
The study also found that, in mainstream young people’s media, lesbianism was completely invisible.
Symbolic annihilation…
Media representations of sexuality in Britain are overwhelmingly heterosexual in character.
Gerbner (2002) argues that the media participate in the symbolic annihilation of gays and lesbians by negatively stereotyping them, by rarely portraying them realistically, or by not portraying them at all.
Craig (1992) suggests that when homosexual characters are portrayed in the media, e.g. in popular drama, they are often stereotyped as having particular amusing or negative psychological and social characteristics.
Craig’s 4 representations…
1) Campness
2) Macho
3) Deviant
4) Responsible for AIDS
Campness…
Campness – this is one of the most widely used gay representations, found mainly in the entertainment media. The camp persona reinforces negative views of gay sexuality by being somewhere in between male and female.
Macho…
Macho – a look that exaggerates masculinity and which is regarded by heterosexual men as threatening because it subverts traditional ideas of masculinity.
Deviant…
Deviant – gays may be stereotyped as deviants, as evil or as devious in television drama, as sexual predators or as people who feel tremendous guilt about their sexuality. In many cases, gay characters are completely defined by the ‘problem’ of their sexuality and homosexuality is often constructed to appear morally wrong.
Responsible for AIDS…
Responsible for AIDS – Watney has illustrated how British news coverage of AIDS in the 1980s stereotyped gay people as carriers of a gay plague. He argues that news coverage of AIDS reflected mainstream society’s fear and dislike of the gay community and resulted in unsympathetic accounts that strongly implied that homosexual AIDS sufferers only had their own ‘immoral and unnatural’ behaviour to blame for their condition or death.
Gauntlett…
Gauntlett argues that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are still under-represented in much of the mainstream media, but things are slowly changing for the better.
Gauntlett suggests that tolerance of sexual diversity is slowly growing in society, and images of diverse sexual identities with which audiences are unfamiliar may assist in making the population generally more comfortable with these alternative sexual lifestyles.
How do we know whether someone is gay?…
Dyer (2002) observed that ‘the person’s person’ alone does not show that a person is gay, and that the media have constructed stereotypical signs of ‘gayness’ which include certain facial expressions, vocal tones, stances or clothing.
Proof of symbolic annihilation…
Research conducted by Stonewall (2011) concluded that the LGBT community were being subjected to symbolic annihilation.
They found that LGBTs were disproportionately consigned to the status of comedic relief – their characters presented as something to laugh at or deride. This was especially found to be the case with representations of lesbianism, frequently presented as over-sexualised and exotic, for male’s viewing pleasure.
Stonewall’s (2011) findings…
Out of a total of 126 hours of television programmes analysed:
> 5 hours and 43 minutes focused on LGBT related issues or characters
> 46 minutes portrayed them realistically or positively
> Stonewall noted that the majority of the coverage represented gays in particular as:
- Unhappy and distressed about their sexual orientation
- As people who had been bullied and rejected by their families
- There was very little reference to lesbians or transsexuals
Are these changing?…
There are several examples of contemporary shows which have LGBT characters , and in which sexuality is largely incidental to the plots in the show, and only part of the character’s identity, rather than them being subsumed by it, as was so often the case in early representations.
Content analysis…
In the USA (not UK unfortunately) GLAAD conducts an annual content analysis of the representation of LGBT characters.
Their 2019 report summarises content analysis of 111 primetime shows with 857 series regular characters broadcast on the main USA networks (ABC, CBS, The CW, FOX, and NBC).
They found that 8.8 percent of ‘series regular characters’ were LGBT.
Other findings…
This was an increase of 2.4 percentage points from the previous year’s 6.4 percent. This is the highest percentage GLAAD has found since it first gathered data in the 2005-06 season.
Of the 8.8% of LGBT characters:
- 42% were gay men (a total of 47 characters)
- 25% were lesbian
- 29% were Bi+ characters make up 29 percent
- 4% were transgender characters
The report also noted that last year, out bisexual actor Alan Cumming was the first gay lead in a U.S. scripted broadcast drama on CBS’ new series ‘Instinct’.
Are they now all positive?…
However, closer analysis may reveal that although representation of LGBT characters is more common than ever, these representations may not be that positive compared to straight characters.
Stefania Sarrubba argues that all of the LGBT characters in Game of Thrones are killed off before the end of the series, except for Yara Greyjoy, who does something powerful at the end of season eight (takes back the Iron Islands), but we don’t actually see this: the show ends focusing on all the straight characters.
