Media Images of Women

The question of the representation of women in the media has been an important one for feminists over the past three decades. This diverse collection of essays represents three major trends in feminist media studies: the liberal feminist perspective, which focuses on the media's tendency to misrepresent and oppress women; the postmodern perspective, which illustrates the ways in which women can participate in, enjoy, and sometimes subvert the dominant media; and the more recent attempts to identify and challenge the subtle backlash that threatens to obliterate feminist gains. The contributors cover a wide range of subjects, from advertisements for women's stockings to the life and death of Princess Diana.

Enduring Values offers a critical examination of 20th century treatments of women in several mass media areas including music, film, and television. This volume is unique in its wide coverage of various media forms and of the corresponding images of women within the respective areas. from the Preface

This book deals with the cultural constructions of gender, the many troubles that underlie them, and U.S. television's place in the overall process. It investigates the 'struggle over meanings'--specifically the meanings of woman, women, and femininity; the role of television networks, production companies, production teams, and publicity firms in generating and circulating these meanings; the ways in which TV viewers, the press, and numerous interest groups produce meanings and countermeanings of their own; and how all of these meanings clash and compete for social and semiotic space and power.

"Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly," writes Morton whose book exposes a multitude of dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarly studies of the history of the Afro-American woman. Disfigured Images explores the "literature of fact" concerning black women during a century of American historiography extending from the late 19th century to the present and finds a body of work that "presented little fact and much fiction." The volume is a long-needed refutation of a caricatured, mythical version of Black women's history.

This study of the relationship between women, media and politics looks at a variety of topics including women as journalists, media framing of the generation gap, and talk radio and gender politics.

David A. Schultz is Professor of Public Administration and Management at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota.