Challenging Images of Women in the Media

Reinventing Women's Lives

Edited by Theresa Carilli, Jane Campbell

Publication date:

13 July 2012

Length of book:

216 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739176986

Challenging Images of Women and the Media: Reinventing Women’s Lives, edited by Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, collects fifteen articles addressing the status of women through an examination of depictions of women in the media. This in-depth study shows how mixed messages from the media muddle attempts at breaking the “glass screen,” causing women to constantly question their role in global culture. With cake ads followed by diet commercials, the media’s depiction of women is both confusing and contradictory. While more and more women have begun to contribute to the media as respected anchors, talk show hosts, and commentators, these portrayals are often counteracted by music videos and reality television shows such as Jersey Shore. This collection seeks to analyze these depictions and their effects on women and culture. The contributors to this anthology hail from such diverse locations as Japan, Australia, Pakistan, India, China, Bulgaria, and the United States. With this global focus, Challenging Images of Women in the Media scrutinizes issues of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality through a study of gendered media portrayals. By challenging the status quo of media images, the contributors to this essential volume invite a dialogue about women’s lives.

Introduction
Part 1. Reinscribing Women’s Roles
Chapter 1. Feeling Good Never Looked Better: Examining Representations of Women in Special K Advertisements
By Vanessa Reimer and Rukhsana Ahmed
Chapter 2. Tales from the Oh-Oku: The Shogun’s Inner Palace and The Outer (Mediated) World
By Kimiko Akita
Chapter 3. Pakistani Media and Disempowerment of Women
By Saman Talib and Zara Idrees
Chapter 4. Women in Film . . . Treading Water but fit for the Marathon
By Lisa French
Part 2. Political Issues
Chapter 5. Mass Media Explain the Global Sex Trade
By Anne Johnston, Barbara Friedman, and Autumn Shafer
Chapter 6. Gendered Construction of Illness: A Post-Structuralist Critique of Gardasil
By Nicole Defenbaugh and Kimberly Kline
Chapter 7. Who’s Afraid of the Pink Chaddi?: New Media, Hindutva, and Feminist Agency in India
By Saayan Chattopadhyay
Part 3. Westernizing Women
Chapter 8. Representation of the Modern Chinese Woman in a Discourse of Consumerism
By Wei Luo
Chapter 9. From “Babushki” to “Sexy Babes”: The Sexing-up of Women in Bulgarian Advertising
By Elza Ibroscheva
Part 4. Political Individuals
Chapter 10. Dorothy Jurney, Fran Harris, and Professional Journalist Networks
By Steven Carl Smith
Chapter 11. The Media Manipulation of Angela Merkel
By Lynn Kutch
Chapter 12. All Hail the Queen: The Metamorphosis or Selling out of Queen Latifah
By Elizabeth Johnson
Chapter 13. 18,000,000 Cracks or How Hillary Almost Became President
By Lori Montalbano
Part 5. Reflective Essays
Chapter 14. Big, Black, Boisterous Badasses: Why Queen-Sized African American Women are Never Really Royalty
By Deatra Sullivan-Morgan
Chapter 15. Lesbian Comics: Negotiating Queer Visibility
By Theresa Carilli

Media representations of women proliferate around the world in an ever more confusing jumble of images ranging from sexualized commodities—both feared and revered—to legitimate political candidates, including antiquated villains that rewrite women’s history. In this volume of carefully selected essays by global scholars, Carilli and Campbell unmask the assertions and demands that such disjointed depictions make on the lives and well-being of real women. But this essential book also illustrates the ways in which women continue to reclaim their own voices, images, desires and power, and in doing so reaffirm our collective humanity.