Lighting the Magic Lantern Social Justice, Media Literacy and Empowerment
By Amy Oden
B.A. in Broadcast Journalism, May 2004, University of Maryland
A Thesis submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
May 20th, 2012
Thesis directed by
Todd Ramlow Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies Abstract of Thesis
Lighting the Magic Lantern
Social Justice, Media Literacy and Empowerment
Media literacy programs have the potential to transform our social landscape if they are engaging women and girls as critically informed producers of visual culture.
Currently, many programs set out to achieve this in the United States, varying wildly in institutional context and financial circumstances. Empowering media literacy education has the potential to be a radical, transformative project. This paper will turn a critical eye toward existing programs, and offer suggestions for future educators.
ii Table of Contents
Abstract of Thesis...... ii
Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1
Chapter 2: Framework and Standpoint: Why Girls? ...... 6
Chapter 3: The Importance of Gendered Participation...... 10
Chapter 4: Theoretical Context for Media Literacy...... 18
Chapter 5: Girls and the Rise of Media Literacy Curricula...... 30
Chapter 6: Curricula...... 36
Chapter 7: Funding and Sustainability...... 45
Chapter 8: Conclusion...... 52
Bibliography ...... 57
End Notes...... 62
iii Chapter 1: Introduction
“Some one had had the happy idea of giving me ... a magic lantern, which used to
be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner
of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the
opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of
many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory
window.”
-Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
What we conceive of as today’s educational “system” began to form centuries ago, with the belief that common consciousness and cultural awareness consisted of knowledge beyond the agrarian. Today, it is arguable that the main goal of modern education is to produce literate citizens. “Literacy” has been a term subject to qualification, and historical, scientific, mathematical and textual literacy have long been included as basic goals of a “well-rounded” education. Vocational schooling and liberal arts schooling can be said to produce different types of literacy, although the split between academic and occupational learning is one that has been decried by many.
Indeed, the term “literacy” has become an educational buzzword in recent years, and the
Standards for the 21st Century Learner, which is partnered in many American states with the Common Core Standards, now includes media literacy among the more traditionally recognized forms of literacy.
1 As society changes and evolves, educators must continually find new ways to connect with the world in which their students reside. Ergo, media literacy became an interest of the institutional educational system in the 1990s. It may seem that media literacy may inherently be framed as a subversive practice and skill set, because of its focus on deconstructing dominant culture. However, this paper will investigate whether or not its varying placements within the educational system may neuter its politics.
The youth-oriented media literacy programs which currently exist in the United
States run the gambit as far as content, approach, and financing. In the following pages I will set forth several ideas about how these programs can be brought closer to their full potential, to promote critical thinking about dominant societal structures. Maintaining a concern with the macro as well as the specific, keeping up with current theoretical developments, intertwining theory and practice, and being mindful of funding sources are the main areas I focus on in my consideration of youth-oriented media literacy programs and curricula. A concern with social justice and empowerment is visible throughout, as I believe that imbuing media studies with these foci can promote a greater understanding of hegemony, and hopefully increase the chance that youth-produced media can introduce new, transformative ideas and narratives into our cultural dialogue.
Macro-level ideas about social structure are fundamental in any media literacy curriculum. Capitalism is clearly linked to our hegemonic social structure, and the free market sale of goods and services is the main funding source for the vast majority of the media we see in the United States. Media literacy education is at its best when it fosters a critical understanding of the systemic and the mainstream. However, if the curricula become as mass-ified as the media itself, they risk a disconnect with the very populations
2 they are trying to engage. For example, if a curriculum is authored around a film from
2007 and taught to young teens in 2012, they may not recall the societal context in which that film was produced. Maintaining a level of community and temporal specificity is of the utmost importance in designing an effective and transformative media literacy syllabus.
Context within theory and place is just as important as context within time and place. Critical media theory, which is intertwined with feminist discourse, has sought to illuminate media constructions and provide starting points for dialogue in and about media. As media theory has developed, an increase in the diversity of voices has fostered an understanding of new perspectives, which has illuminated the concern for social justice within the discipline. If modern criticisms and frameworks about media are made legible to young people, they may have a greater understanding of the social responsibility involved in producing media, as well as the general concepts behind social justice. Optimal media literacy curricula, then, should be concerned with the ever- evolving body of theoretical knowledge. Acknowledging the range of subjectivities in media viewership, considering concepts like globalization, hybrid identities and diasporas, and promoting a greater concern for media literacy “from below” are just some of the ways youth-oriented media literacy curricula can model itself after current theoretical developments. Tangible benefits from this kind of critical education are visible when students are concurrently taught production skills, as they can apply these concepts actively into the media they make.
Although theory is important to media literacy, we are at our best as scholars when we aim to acknowledge and work against what bell hooks calls a “false dichotomy
3 between theory and practice”i. Within our modern school system, there is a split between educating students who think, and students who do. “True” media literacy, then, involves not only an understanding of media texts themselves, but also an acquisition of the technical skills that enable media creation. Encouraging an active and theoretically astute participation in media making subverts the schism between theory and practice, or between academic and vocational. Prioritizing this kind of comprehensive and practiced literacy for adolescents empowers them, but this may only be feasible when funding is plentiful.
A thorough media literacy is one concerned with authorship, and by extension, funding. Recognizing that mass media’s images “are value-laden, socially loaded, and ideologically charged”ii, forces us to understand that tangible social injustice can be exacerbated and perpetuated by the capitalist media, for instance, through stereotyping.
The funding of any media literacy programming is therefore important to consider both for teachers and students. Funding directly impacts our ability to be explicitly concerned with production in the classroom, as well as the size of the curriculum, and access to educators that have advanced knowledge of current theoretical concepts. Additionally, it may affect the texts we use, and quite possibly the bias and intent of the curriculum author.
It is becoming widely understood that “media culture [is] a dominant socializing force in contemporary U.S. society”iii, and that it is advantageous for adolescents to become “media literate”. Given this understanding, it is my contention that programs which operate in a deliberately empowerment-based framework can profoundly shift the cultural landscape in this country if they are mindfully engaging students as new, literate
4 producers of visual media. This project offers benefits for all youth, but was born out of a concern for the voices of women and girls, for whom it has especially powerful ramifications. I will contextualize my examination of various curricula by first providing insight into questions of gender and authorship, mass culture discourse and the development of media theories, and the rise of girl-centered media literacy programs.
5 Chapter 2: Framework and Standpoint: Why Girls?
“Female youth, especially adolescents, are uniquely disadvantaged in patriarchal
societies and thus need special assistance in order to be socially and
psychologically healthy individuals”iv
My own position as a feminist and a documentarian informs my interest in and commitment to these issues. When I was sixteen, I enrolled in my first media literacy class. The realizations I had during my time there completely altered the course of my life. I became interested in visual representations of women, and by extension feminism.
I obtained my Bachelors degree in broadcast journalism, minored in film, and acquired a certificate of achievement in women’s studies during my undergraduate studies. For the past seven years I have produced documentaries about international arts and culture, and have learned a great deal about social justice and film making during this time. In addition, I have produced, directed and distributed a feature length documentary about women in underground music, which has drawn international attention to a variety of gender, race, and class related issues within musical subcultures.
Over the past several years, I have begun to work with girls’ empowerment programs. I volunteered as a mentor with Girls, Incorporated for a semester, and taught film making at a youth organization called Media Works. I have also designed and taught media literacy workshops at Girls Rock! for the past three years. I have been fortunate to be engaged with media theory and social justice in my academic career,
6 while simultaneously learning about video production and storytelling. I view these two components of my education as having produced an informed theoretical practice.
I approach this project from a framework of post-modern, Marxist feminism. I believe that “there are no facts, only interpretations”v, and that the myth of objectivity across many academic disciplines has begun to crumble. Specifically positioned, subjective knowledge has begun to be recognized as valid, and I believe it is important to embrace this concept. As they are recognized in theoretical discourse, the potential of new subjectivities to be heard and to shape the future of the mass media becomes more real.
I am also interested in understanding the effects of neo-liberal capitalism on our society, because I agree with Marxist theorists like Bourdieu that, “economic theory has
[reduced] the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange”vi. Neoliberalism has begun to produce tangible changes in our educational system. The privatization of curriculum design and the popularization of non-profit after school programs are two such modern developments. Consumer dollars, collected by corporate entities, are now being disbursed in public education as the government continues to struggle financially. To this end, I feel I would be remiss to neglect a section on how media literacy programs are funded. The base project of media literacy education involves an understanding of authorship; if we do not examine the curricula we teach in this arena, we as media literacy educators risk hypocrisy.
I am interested in studying and creating girl-specific programs because I have a strong commitment to empowering girls. However, many of the curricula I discuss are not limited to female-identified students. This is a partial result of my desire to
7 accumulate curricula from a variety of backgrounds, and a partial result of the scarcity of girl-only programs that are willing to share sometimes-proprietary material for research purposes. If a commitment to social justice is central to these curricula, I believe that societal discourse can begin to shift. It is precisely these “strategies for changing discourse [that can], in turn, affect the structuring of our lives in society”vii. Taken in this light, the designs of these curricula have powerful ramifications.
I do feel that it is incorrect to “assume that strength in unity can only exist if difference is suppressed and shared experience is highlighted”viii, and that learning is enriched by the emphatic acknowledgement and discussion of difference. To be fair, there is ”no one correct way to be a feminist, no seamless narrative to assume and fit into”ix. The work of scholars like Melissa A. Milkie suggests that the media affects different women differently, and that variation in interpretation and understanding exists, even across small samples. We can only benefit from acknowledging these differences both inside gender-segregated settings and in society writ large.
The focus of media production and literacy work has implications for broadly implemented curricula, but having been a part of collectives and an active participant in spaces like Girls Rock! camps, I believe in the strength of female-identified spaces as places for building solidarity. Gender-neutral spaces for learning are important, and differences in any grouping must be acknowledged. However, my background and interests center on making media literacy and production accessible to communities of women and girls, so that they may more fully participate in the making and understanding of the mass media; which can now be said to constitute a “commons”, or shared culture in the United States. Historically, the ability to speak and be heard in this
8 shared culture has mostly been afforded to those at the top of hegemony. Media literacy and production that are overtly concerned with social justice have the potential to shift this mediated environment, providing space for a greater diversity of participation in our public “commons” of debate and discourse.
9 Chapter 3: The Importance of Gendered Participation in Mass Culture Discourse
The Commons
The mass media is one of the newest forms that our “common” consciousness, or public dialogue, now takes. From the town square, to the printed word, to the online forum, women have had a history of difficult access to public discourse. The opportunity to participate in common, mass culture has traditionally only been extended to those at the top of hierarchy, and assimilating to dominant modes of thought has long helped those trying to use their voice or assert their visibility in public dialogue. Our concern with technology is perhaps a modern iteration of this point, where lack of instruction and access to dominant communication methods has complicated the issue of developing an audible voice “from below” for many women, as well as anyone not considered to be benefiting from the upper echelons of hegemonic structure. An audible voice, in this context, is one that is accessible through a mediated context, reaching its desired audience.
Even language gives us boxes to think in. Like gender and race, it controls the parameters of how we view the world. Recorded communication distributes knowledge, but also necessitates education about how to decode and interpret meaning out of the symbols we see. Simply put: codifying communication means controlling it. From the invention of the printing press, what we now term as “mass culture” has been dictated in this manner, where the medium is as important to understand as the message.
10 The structure of communication in any given society can be said to become, “the
organizing principle of life”x. Once a method of communication is adopted by a society,
it becomes the dominant framework for thinking. Vivianne Sobcheck argues that the
photographic, cinematic, and electronic waves of media development that began during
particular times have spurred specific “perceptual revolution[s] within the culture and the
subject. That is, each has been significantly co-constitutive … of the dominant cultural
logics”xi. However, literacy in these communication methods, and thus contemporary modes of thought, is tangled up with access to education. Women and other oppressed groups will not be what Toby Miller refers to as full cultural citizensxii if they do not have
the ability to access, understand, and employ the methods of communication that are
prevalent in their societies to participate in public discourse.
The “public sphere” has therefore historically been constructed as a hegemonic
and masculine space. Prior to the industrial revolution, the public sphere had been
associated with government and commerce, and education of the masses took place
largely “through culture, folklore, and an array of social institutions, [creating] what
comes to be known as “common sense””xiii. This is what Jürgen Habermas refers to as
the “commons.”
The commons began to close with the beginning of, “the portable book, which
men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. [Ergo] literacy conferred the
power of detachment, non-involvement”xiv. With mass-printed and distributed texts, social doctrines became more one-directional, that is closed to dialogue. The ability to talk and be heard en mass was cut off from a majority of the population, which intensified societal stratification. Shortly, however, the industrial revolution increased
11 the availability of the printing press. The “commons” re-opened slightly, and leaflets soon gave way to newspaper distribution. The arrival of the magazine soon heralded the rise of the niche market. This later happened with television as wellxv, as cable channels have proliferated.
Around this time, the beginnings of “mass” culture were splitting off from what was commonly understood to be a “canon” of high culture. “Low” culture, that which could be easily replicated, began to take shape. Female journalists struggled to be taken seriously during this time, aided by public figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, who held all- women press conferences in an effort to grant women newsworthy stories. The voices of women in public discourse were often either excluded, or relegated to home and fashion topics. Images of women, however, were dominant throughout the printed page.
Although women were not typically being heard in the public sphere during this time, they were being seen. Cover illustrations on periodicals may have been “the first mass media stereotypes”xvi. The advent of photography, a technology lending itself to replication, furthered the idea of media as a decontextualized text, in that it fixes “its ostensible subject quite literally as an object for vision”xvii, by removing it from its temporal situation. During this time, and until the present day, images of women continue to feature prominently across the mass media, speaking symbolically but often not literally, and placed in context by their makers. This lack of varied imagery, coupled with the scarcity of female media producers are both reasons why media literacy for women and girls is so important.
The invention of film seemed to close access to the commons, and restored only a framed illusion of temporal context by placing images in a constructed narrative. The
12 wide availability of the television in the 1920s made this kind of image-based mass media more accessible than ever, confirming that, “visual culture may no longer be just one aspect of culture but is, instead, the dominant or overwhelming form that culture now takes”xviii. The subsequent commercial availability of the VCR is widely known to have been driven by the pornography industry, another illustration of the profitability of the female figure, along with her relative silence.
Throughout all of these changes, the public “commons” has continually opened and closed in the mainstream, as well as in various subcultures. This opening and closing is directly tied to economic and social privilege, as well as the availability of new technologies. Plainly, time and money affect access to resources, and “ability or talent is itself the product of an investment of time and cultural capital”xix. The public sphere thus remains a site dominated by those with hegemonic power, but it has shifted irrevocably, as more diverse segments of the populace have gained access to distribute their ideas.
The Internet is the newest manifestation of this, and currently exists as an open-access, but rapidly consolidating space.
With the development of the large volume of user-generated content online, the
“commons” can be said to be open again in our current moment, but perhaps not for long.
Historically, “the bourgeois public sphere sought to form a common will, whereas that
Internet seems to fragment or at least question the idea of universality or common interest, facilitating precisely the opposite – pluralism”xx. All media are distributable online, making the idea of the Internet as fairly nonhierarchicalxxi valid, at least as long as net neutrality lasts. However, Hulu is already beginning to adopt paid content services, rendering only certain portions of “public” dialogue publicly accessible. America Online
13 purchased the Huffington Post, which gestures towards media consolidation, and may be a harbinger of more paid content caveats to come. Paid, on-demand media is becoming the new niche market in the age of online, networked corporatization. Whether it happens formally or not, the Internet is becoming regulated by the “free” economy.
For the time being at least, access to public distribution for ideas is greater than ever before online, and there is a much quicker time between authoring and receiving public feedback. Dialogue is taking place in the mediated, online “commons” on a scale we haven’t witnessed for a long time. Although new spaces for discourse exist online, they are in danger of becoming heavily policed and framed by corporations as the commons begins to be closed once again. As schisms between grassroots and corporately backed media deepen online, the nuances of internet authorship have begun to further complicate issues of dialogue, voice and access to the discourse in the commons.
Authorship and the Internet
Historically, the mainstream mass media has been composed largely of members of the ruling class in the United States, and most of it is “designed for, about, and by men”xxii. If white, upper-middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied men are producing and managing the content of our common discourse, and have been for generations, it can accurately be said that media employees are working within a long tradition of dominance. Although mainstream media producers can come from other demographics, their work still occurs in an assimilationist environment, which is dominated by those at the top of the hegemonic power structure we live in. This replication of dominant
14 ideology in the mainstream media is generally the price paid by individuals who wish to access its power.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that, “popular culture is one of the sites where
[a] struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged”xxiii. It is possible to have a hegemonically dominant media maker who holds a concern for social justice; however, it is rare. Although many criticisms of mass media representations seem to assume white, wealthy, heterosexual male producers, it is the specific attitudes and experience of the producers that can sometimes be more relevant to the depictions they craft.
Unsurprisingly, considering the dominance of hegemony within producer-ship, there is still a shortage of female producers of moving-image mass mediaxxiv. However, many of the women who obtain these jobs are producing cultural imagery without a commitment to social justice. As DeBord puts it, “many believe they are in on the secret
[and] someone who is happy to be taken into confidence is hardly likely to criticize it”xxv.
Even though it is arguable that female media producers have an inherent knowledge of what W.E.B. DuBois called a “double consciousness”, in order to achieve and maintain a position of power within the mainstream media, they will likely have to replicate dominant ideas.
Female-identified media producers are just as capable of reifying existing norms as their male counterparts; the cyclical nature of ideological subject production is often left out of the discussion in media literacy programs. “We think that news programs must be getting less sexist because there are now famous women newscasters, but we also see how women’s issues are either sensationalized or trivialized, while women’s voices about major areas of national policy are ignored”xxvi. A female voice may not necessarily be
15 one concerned with liberatory politics or counterhegemony, which is why a basis in critical media literacy is important. If theoretical media literacy is taught hand in hand with media production, it becomes more plausible for media producers to understand the critiques of dominant social structure that are contained in theoretical discourse, and to hopefully begin to shift their image-making practices.
With the rise of the Internet and the opening of the digital commons, new forms of collective and individual identity have emerged online. Many scholars and online media producers have discussed the ability of the author to remain anonymous online, some celebrating “a democratic public sphere unencumbered by the stultifying routines and alienating hierarchies of the real world”xxvii. Although the questioning of individual authenticity is perhaps a new phenomenon online, a concern with authorship harkens back, at least, to post-modern philosophy. This anxiety over authority and authenticity may be symptomatic of a cultural propensity towards having the “commons” remain bourgeois and hegemonic. If, in order to credit and believe someone’s statements, we must know unequivocally what their background and physicality consists of, then we have already condemned them to their position within hegemony.
There are those who decry the split between the online persona and the physical body, and those who have lamented the death of the split between public and private.
The speed of Internet communication allows the online user to exist as private and public, simultaneously. These nuances of online authorship perhaps pave the way for a mass mediated environment where the ideology of an author is often more apparent than their physicality, making ideas more accessible than their makers.
16 Those who bemoan the culture of nihilism that the Internet enables in the United
States would do well to recognize that the Internet can be utilized as a tool for learning and sociopolitical change, if approached the right way. Access to the Internet and social media is still compounded by issues of privilege, but it is important to remember that there are people in Egypt, Libya, and Wisconsin utilizing these tools for social change.
The Internet contains a wealth of free knowledge, and makes possible various forms of subversive education, centered on empowerment and connectivity. Truly contemporary media literacy involves an engagement with the online medium. However, a basic understanding of media theory and its developments is perhaps the first step towards fostering an awareness of media in general, and the Internet specifically, as a potential tool for social justice and empowerment.
17 Chapter 4: Theoretical Context For Media Literacy
Many media literacy programs are centered on encouraging students to actively engage with and interpret the media they encounter. Often these programs leave out the nuance of theoretical developments in scholarship, as well as the larger theoretical picture beyond interpretation and deconstruction. Psychology and subjectivity in viewership are important areas of theoretical research, but they are only the beginning of feminist media study. The correspondence between cultural context and imagery is important for students to understand, as is the idea that the media frames reality in specific ways. The latter point has gained importance in the wake of the economic trend towards “reality” television. These theoretical topics can endow students with a more thorough understanding of the social causes and effects that situate media, which better equips them to produce their own texts.
Origins of Media Theory and the Gaze
The progress and popularization of media literacy education has been loosely tied to the developments in media theory. Early media theorists were concerned about the ability of the mass media to maintain hegemonic social divisions within capitalism. In
1964, Herbert Marcuse warned against, “the technological veil [which] conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement”xxviii. While these early scholars focused primarily on the class ideologies espoused by the media, ideas about the connections between mass culture and patriarchy were not far behind.
18 Marshall McLuhan’s seminal text “The Medium Is the Massage”, published in
1967, is widely considered to be the starting point for modern media criticism in the
United States. In this book he explains what he perceives to be a new “electric information environment [which] compels commitment and participation”xxix. McLuhan also sets forth the idea that “social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments”xxx, advocating responsible media consumption and production. Many of his concepts, including his idea of the “global village” still hold weight today.
In the mid-1970’s, Christian Metz published “Film Language: A Semiotics of the
Cinema”, in which he outlined two gazes in film – that of the protagonist, and that of the spectator. Laura Mulvey soon developed a feminist interpretation of this idea. Her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was published in 1975, and engages with psychoanalysis to articulate the gendered structure of gazes involved in spectatorship. Mulvey asserts that mainstream cinema is founded on masculine constructs, which assume a male spectator, and produce women as the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning”xxxi. Men are subjects and women are objects in her conception of visual media.
Many scholars have built on Mulvey’s ideas, and expanded the body of work involved with spectatorship. In contrast to Mulvey’s idea that female spectators are inherently masochists, Mary Ann Doane argues, “the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a kind of narcissism”xxxii. Rosalind Gill explains this narcissism as taking place in a neoliberal context “in which the objectifying male gaze is internalized to form a new disciplinary regime”xxxiii.
19 Ann Kaplan separated male and female from masculine and feminine gazes, and
theorized that it is possible for a female spectator to take “on the “masculine” role as
bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action”xxxiv. She also criticized the “women’s” genre of the melodrama for encouraging women to accept their domestic “constraints as
“natural” inevitable – as given”xxxv. Kaplan’s acknowledgements of different genres, and
different target audiences for different texts helped open the door for further scholarship,
by entertaining that diverse target audiences exist, and that each necessitates different
kinds of representations.
bell hooks further problematizes the idea of Kaplan’s structured “gaze” when she
explains that “there is power in looking”xxxvi for women and people of color. hooks
engages with the “problem of structuring feminist film theory around a totalizing
narrative of woman as object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe
patriarchy”xxxvii. According to hooks, spectators occupy a multitude of hegemonic
positions, and subversive readings of texts are not only possible, but should be
encouraged.
Judith Halberstam also built on Mulvey’s ideas in 2001. She sets forth a similar
idea to Kaplan when she writes about the “queer dimension of the masquerade”xxxviii,
which occurs when a female viewer identifies with a male character on screen. However,
Halberstam’s important break with existing scholarship occurs when she says, “to the
extent that the cinema depends upon the power to activate and attract desiring relations, it
depends upon a sexual and gendered economy of looking, watching and identifying”xxxix.
Halberstam points out that Mulvey and her theoretical descendents are working within a heterosexist framework. She also reminds us that mass media occurs within a cultural
20 landscape of heterosexist hegemony, and that even existing “queer characters will
function to confirm the rightness of heterosexual object choice”xl in mainstream cinema.
Diversity in viewership and interpretation has thusly been acknowledged.
Unintended identifications, subjectivity, race and sexuality have all been added to the
theoretical discourse. Jose Muñoz even argues for a strategic survival-based viewership,
involving identification or refusal thereof as a type of voluntary practice for marginalized
viewers that he terms “disidentification”.xli Many theorists have begun to advocate
finding pleasure in media, exercising spectator subjectivity and agency to find ways in
which we can take pleasure in media texts without “being duped”xlii by them. This idea of subversive viewing is a fraught concept; it has the potential to be a survival strategy, but also may silence critical dialogue, or produce a type of Stockholm syndrome. If our embrace of pleasure in media viewership is uncritical, we risk complacency with the very structures we are aiming to understand and disarm.
Teaching the theory behind deliberate and conscious viewership to media literacy students is one way to empower them, and to begin to situate media interpretation as a site of potentially subversive practice. A transformative media literacy curriculum must explore this area of scholarship to move towards encouraging active viewing and media interpretation. Teaching an awareness of the developments in media imagery is also important to undertake in this endeavor, especially when considering instruction for women and girls.
21 Imagery and Visibility
Concurrent with the emerging feminist interpretations of the mainstream
hegemonic “gaze” was a larger, evolving body of work on mass culture. Feminist media
theorists began to engage the contextual specifics of historical and political formation of
images, authorship and interpretation, media ownership, and an awareness of free market
capitalism in the United States.
Feminist media theorist Jean Kilbourne’s groundbreaking documentary “Killing
Us Softly”, released in 1979, is an indictment of the advertising industry’s attitudes
towards women, and has subsequently been reworked four times. In 1981, Stuart Hall
wrote that the mass media in the context of capitalism is “quite rightly associated with the
manipulation and debasement of the culture of the people”xliii. He also problematized
“the notion of the people as a purely passive”xliv body, which helped to introduce the idea of subjective interpretation to media theory. Guy DeBord also characterized mainstream media as a “fallacious, deceptive, imposturous, seductive, insidious, captious… spectacle”xlv in 1988.
Also in 1988, the pilot broadcasts of Murphy Brown and Roseanne aired, both of
which were wildly popular, and are often cited as expansions on the roles of female
characters in televised narrative. The success of these shows coincided with a boom in
feminist media theory, and perhaps saw antecedents in Sandra Day O’Conner’s
appointment to the Supreme Court, along with Geraldine Ferraro’s run for the vice
presidency, both of which had taken place only a few years prior. This concurrence of
22 real world change, theoretical development, and media visibility is not a rarity. “The
Beauty Myth” was published in 1991, closely followed by Susan Faludi’s “Backlash”.
All of these texts added to a growing interest in addressing the mainstream media’s
depictions of women and feminism.
In addition to Jean Kilbourne, Jib Fowles, Sut Jhally, and a slew of other
advertising and media scholars gained recognition for their work during this time period.
In 1996, Fowles asserted that the mass media operates in the capitalist context of “a
spiraling of need and image”xlvi, and that it therefore continues to hone ideas about
“prototypes of maleness and femaleness”xlvii in the United States. Jean Kilbourne’s oft- cited book Deadly Persuasion criticizes the ways in which advertising co-opts the
concept of freedom to mean consumer choicexlviii, in addition to the way the mass media
encourages women to “constantly perfect and change ourselves, working for self-
improvement rather than social change”xlix.
During the mid-1990s, there was an explosion of academic media theory that
focused on positionality, intersectionality, and subjectivity. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this
was the same time that the rise of cable television fractured the broadcast medium into
niche markets. A range of demographics began to be considered in both theory and mass
culture. Theorists began to go beyond numeric understandings of women in media to
look at the individuals who were producing and receiving the texts. Increasing numbers
and of women behind the scenes, and greater diversity of women in front of the camera
continues to be understood as progress through the present day. In the mid-1990s, there
arose an interest in queer readings of media, as well as an acknowledgement that even
“mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledge[d] black female
23 spectatorship”l, or the spectatorships of other people of color. Concern with spectator diversity as beginning to grow in theory, as well as in the marketplace.
Around this time, “the new consumer culture [had begun to produce] racially marginalized subjects as consumers”li, and limited visibility for marginalized people in the mass media was a result, along with a multitude of new theoretical concerns. When a subject becomes visible in popular culture, it is generally because that demographic’s marketing potential has been realized within the capitalist system. According to bell hooks, “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture”lii. One way that representations of difference manifest in mainstream culture can be better understood is by acknowledging and understanding the temporal and geographic situating of the texts themselves. This has been another area concern for media scholarship and inquiry.
It is often possible to link portrayals to historical events or prevailing cultural attitudes. Modern stereotypical depictions of Asian American women have now been traced back to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and many modern mainstream media depictions of black women have been linked to images of the Hottentot Venus. However, finding historical antecedents of modern racist images has only been a part of the equation; contemporary context is also important. For instance, it is often cited that
Regan’s colorblind rhetoric in the 1980’s gave birth to texts like the Cosby Show, which
“reflect[ed] the ethnic diversity of viewers”liii, but often “glossed over racial inequalities and conflicts”liv that these groups experience in real life. In the wake of commodified
“multiculturalism”, the mass media seems to promote the idea that racial “harmony can be achieved through sharing and consuming multiple cultures”lv, predicated on any given
24 culture’s visibility in the mainstream. Obviously, a tokenizing visibility can contribute to a skewed perception of the position that any “other” holds in society. For instance, Will and Grace is devoid of antigay violence; viewers may not understand that this is a facet of queer life if watching the show is their primary foundation for understanding queer culture.
Entire bodies of theory about media representations of specific issues and in specific genres have now proliferated. Sexuality, motherhood and masculinity, stand-up comedy, pornography and horror have generated volumes of criticism and analysis.
Whole volumes of writing have been published on very different topics; Carol Clover’s
Men, Women and Chainsaws, and Erica Rand’s Barbie’s Queer Accessories are two such bookslvi. In 1994, Ikea produced the first prime time, televised advertisement aimed at queer men, and the sit-com Roseanne aired the first prime-time lesbian kiss. These types of evolutions in representation and theory continue to diversify, especially with the fragmentation and customization of online media.
In the wake of these developments, a comprehension of the correlation between real world events and the media landscape must be maintained in media literacy education in order for students to fully understand our mediated culture. Another recent theoretical development that is important to discuss in media literacy curricula is the understanding that there is no objectivity in production, even in sites that purport to mirror real life.
25 Objectivity in Contemporary Media
I recently attended a conference entitled “Advocacy Journalism in the Digital
Age”, at which much of the discussion revolved around non-profits coupling with news outlets, embedding journalists with their subjects so that they can work as cause-specific advocates. Simple editorial work, like story assignments, has enabled managerial bias to shape the news for a long time, and events like the “Advocacy Journalism” conference are popularizing this understanding among industry professionals. Perhaps since the rise of feminist anthropology in the 1970’slvii, women have been advocating for the acknowledgement that “true” objectivity in the research and production of texts about reality is a farce. Mass media is no different, and a thorough, holistic approach to media literacy should explain that subjectivity is just as prominent in production as it is in reception and interpretation of media. Especially in news and reality television, it is important for students to be able to tell the difference between reality and its framed interpretation.
Criticism is just beginning to blossom surrounding the media’s depiction of
“reality”, both in “reality television”, and in news programming. The rise of talk shows is often cited as the beginning of “reality” television, but local news and documentaries are two other longstanding genres that purport to tell the objective truth about the subjects they portray. Anything we see on television is heavily mediated; that is, subject to intense framing. Deliberate decisions that shape what we see onscreen are made by the crew before, during, and after the production of these shows. Casting, set design, shooting logistics, and editing are only a few examples of the myriad of ways in which
26 framing occurs. Critical media literacy should strive towards explaining this process, so
that students may understand it technically and theoretically. An arena where this
process of framing has been historically present is news, however, the recent rise of
“reality” television has drawn much-needed theoretical attention to this issue.
Many take mainstream news in the United States a straightforward reportage of
facts. However, the opinions that mainstream news is imbued with are a direct result of
the capitalist economy in which news reports reside. “Their unction is not an informed
public, but an emotionally aroused audience that is susceptible to advertising”lviii. If the
news media is participating in the commercial economy, there is no real way for its
content to be completely unbiased, despite the popular news rhetoric of “fair and
accurate” news reporting. Indeed, the news media can be called “one of the essential
forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology”lix. In the modern American manifestation of
capitalism, the mainstream news media provides a pedantic, or scholastic, environment.
Its content is thus taken as fact, and its opinions are seen as the “common sense” points of
view.
A development of recent years, “reality” television series’ have tried to maintain
the guise of depicting unfiltered real life in their programming. The arrival of modern
“reality” television as we know it was heralded by the premiere of MTV’s The Real
World in 1992, closely followed by the debut of Big Brother in 1999. By publicizing minute details of the lives of everyday people, “reality” television has responded to the changing landscape of the mass media by producing niche programming with low overhead, creating what some have called a “new public sphere”lx. This idea is important
to acknowledge in media literacy curricula, because it can tie in to students’ creation and
27 maintenance of their own online personas and projects as an illustration of a public self.
By understanding the process through which a mediated self is created, students can
begin to see their own agency more clearly, both as producers and as critical viewers,
along with the ways in which their agency is limited by the media they engage with.
Reality television is a response to changes in the economics of television
production. “Embedded advertising”, or product placement, makes these shows less
dependent on traditional ratings or commercial “breaks”lxi. Reality shows do not have to be well written or acted; in fact they inarguably reduce the need and “opportunities for union-represented actors, writers, and crew”lxii. The casting of non-actors contributes to
the ongoing “break down the subject-object duality”lxiii we experience when engaging
with media as consumers. Now, subjects are just like us, and we can be just like them; if
we buy the right products. As far back as 1944, Marxist thinkers warned us, “real life is
becoming indistinguishable from the movies”lxiv. Reality television is one of the newest
steps in this direction, another is the move toward user-generated content.
Community reporting and user-generated content are gaining traction in the news
media, and elsewhere. On one hand, it seems empowering to be offered opportunities “to
get involved in story generation, creation, and dissemination”lxv, but there is a fine line
between empowerment and exploitation when free labor is involved. The 2011 Allied
Media Conference in Detroit offered a workshop entitled “Pay the Writer”. As the line
between layperson and professional is blurred, fact checking and critical readership
becomes ever more important. Students of media literacy should be aware of all of these
nuances as they decide exactly how and under what terms they will participate in public
discourse online.
28 In mainstream culture, anything that “seems to take place outside ideology, in
reality takes place in ideology… That is why those who are in ideology believe
themselves by definition outside ideology”lxvi. This is true for the personnel involved in the news media, as well as the “Americans [that] have become numb to the unbalanced and unhealthy diet of TV news”lxvii. It is in this environment, and through these channels,
that the dominant ideologies of consumerism and hegemony are replicated in the United
States. When the news media espouses the dominant culture’s interpretation of issues,
they are often unquestioned. This can have dangerous implications, such as the
continued and pervasive discrediting of sexual assault survivors, which is perpetuated by
the news media. Examples like this illustrate the need for critical and subversive media
production, where narratives centered around counterhegemonic ideas can be told.
Feminist concern with mass media representations has evolved over thirty years
of scholarship and activism. The inclusion of women, queers, and nonwhites into the
body of theoretical scholarship has strengthened the ties between media studies and social
justice. Sadly, however, it is still true that we are not typically taught to engage in active
viewing of the mass media as children. Often in media classes, one hears the complaint
that active viewing takes the fun out of viewership. I would argue that it enables a
different type of fun altogether – that which comes from intellectual engagement. Often,
this is a starting point for youth media literacy. However, the nuances in viewership
theory, the socioeconomic situating of imagery, and understanding the framing entailed
in mediated “reality” can only serve to improve these curricula.
29 Chapter 5: Girls and the Rise of Media Literacy Curricula: Harm Reduction
As media theory has evolved, and as media have diversified and conglomerated, a concurrent concern with the schooling and esteem of adolescent girls has pushed the development of after school programs centered on gender and empowerment, as well as programming centered on media literacy. In addition to lacking much of the nuance delved into above, many of these programs fall in line with a long history of protectionist logic. This approach can be seen in programs that demonize media consumption, or those in which the ultimate goal is to drive young people away from televisions and computers. The ones that aren’t framed this way tend to encourage an embrace of media- as-pleasure. Truly progressive media literacy curricula should be taught from a harm reduction framework, where the autonomy and agency of students is respected, but a critical eye is encouraged. This is not often something extended to girls in their adolescence.
Large scale “concern” with adolescent girls in mainstream Western culture dates back at least to the medicalization of anorexia. This occurred in the late “nineteenth century [when] adolescent girls refuse[d] food”lxviii, and was seen as tied to the development of the “bourgeoisie and to the place that daughters assumed in that particular family constellation”lxix. The Girls Clubs of America and similar institutions hearken back to this time periodlxx.
It should be noted that girls have been cultural producers since at least the middle of the 20th century. The incidence of girl “letter-writing, scrapbook making, and newsletter production [proves] that there is a much longer history of girls’ creative
30 cultural practices that has been excluded from most analyses of American youth
culture”lxxi, however, the vast majority of these practices remained in the private sphere,
and did not take place in the “commons”. In 1944, Seventeen magazine premiered,
demonstrating the viability of the adolescent female niche marketlxxii in the national
economy, and fixing discourse about adolescent girls in the mainstream print media.
Discourse and cultural production by girls, however, did not gain wider attention until the
third wave of feminism in the 1990s.
General media literacy instruction became a subject of international interest in the
1970s, when Australia and England began to develop their public school curricula on the
subject. Girl-centered programs, however, didn’t begin to form until the aforementioned
third feminist wave, almost twenty years later. Support for the early, general media
literacy programs in the United States was fleeting, and funding, although initially
invested, soon dwindled domesticallylxxiii. However, during the 1980s, teen suicide in the
United States increased by 75 percentlxxiv, and “the number of young people who bothered to vote had been dropping since 1984”lxxv. American youth was increasingly
disillusioned and disconnected. Mainstream concern with apathetic youth in the United
States, specifically girls, began to grow again during this time. This moral panic reached
a high point following the 1994 publication of “Reviving Ophelia”, which characterized
mass culture as “junk”lxxvi. This book is often cited as a catalyst for the re-investment of
funding in youth empowerment programs shortly after this time.
Over the course of the Clinton administration, this rise in public concern about
youth and critical media awareness led to a proliferation of both youth empowerment
nonprofit organizations, as well as media literacy programs in public schoolslxxvii. These
31 state sponsored programs often focused on advertising, and drew heavily on the work of
scholars like Sut Jhally and Jean Kilbourne, who argue for liberation from false, mass-
culture consciousness.
Simultaneously, the youth-led third wave of feminism was building to a
crescendo. The seeds of this swell in girl-led sub-cultural production were planted in the
late 1970slxxviii. Girls produced a wealth of zines and music during the early to mid
1990s, seeking to eschew “mainstream America’s ideas about what they were doing or
where they ought to be going”lxxix. Their emphasis on consciousness-raising and
establishing group empathy helped them realize their problems as symptoms of systemic
issueslxxx. The understanding that one’s problems have a context in a larger societal
structure is often fostered in empowerment programs for girls, and it is important to
recognize the power of solidarity in these contexts. Third-wave feminism was also
openly concerned with cultural production, something that media literacy programs often
lack.
During this time, media curricula that were authored in girl-centered
organizations and the occasional public school espoused a protectionist approach. The
prevailing sentiments in mainstream society, as well as in media theory at the time were
primarily centered on ideas about media being inherently bad, which ignore any
subjectivity or agency on the part of the viewer. These curricula demonstrate “the strong
influence of middle-class tastes and values”lxxxi that was being expressed by Pipher,
Kilbourne, and their contemporaries at the time. This “construction of girls as passive,
silent victims who need to be saved by older feminists”lxxxii chalks any enjoyment they derive from the media up to false consciousness, or universalizes girls’ experience,
32 ignoring any difference or diversity in terms of race, class, sexuality, etc.. Rescue and
protection have arguably always been common themes in times of large-scale concern
about adolescent girls; this attitude denies them agency and active engagement with the
subject matter at hand.
The girls who took the reins behind various means of production during the riot
grrrl movement \proved this protectionist approach to be obsolete. Girls were embracing
and utilizing mass media techniques to amplify their voices during the 1990s, but riot
grrrl’s tenuous relationship with the mainstream media gestures towards the enduring
import of maintaining a critical awareness about the media in women and girls. The
subsequent ascent of the politically neutered “girl power” phenomenon is a newer,
perhaps more complex development that also has implications for women and girls.
As scholars have noted, after the rise and fall of riot grrrl and political hip-hop,
the “girl power” phenomenon arose as “the culture industries’ response to these social
movements”lxxxiii. In the Bill Clinton tide of neoliberal globalization, post-race and post- feminist ideas took hold in the United States. Images like those promoted and disseminated by the Spice Girls arguably contributed to the cultural erasure of riot grrrl, and mainstream rap’s focus on glorified violence, sexism and money closed the doors that underground rap had opened.
It is no coincidence that girl power in pop culture came into being at the same time that pop-feminism developed; the commodification of third wave feminism manifested in both these phenomena. These potentially revolutionary images and practices had been turned “into glamour and nostalgia”lxxxiv. The turn towards pleasure
within feminism was manifested in the rise of Jessica Valenti, and ideas about viewer
33 subjectivity gained momentum within feminist film criticism to “counter the trend in
feminist [media] studies of reading for the wry pleasures of catching patriarchy at its old
tricks once again”lxxxv. The focus on individual interpretation allowed for a call to validate pleasure in viewership as valid which is central to much of Valenti’s work.
Also around this time, some critical media theory began to embrace the media’s
“low culture”, or disavow the split between low and high culture entirely, focusing instead on the pleasure involved in viewership. This embrace of pleasure is seen broadly across pop culture, feminist discourse, and media scholarship during this time. To be sure, there is something to be said for balancing cynicism with pleasure. In a way, it is a survival mechanism. However, a concern for systemic, oppressive context is undeniably also important.
Partially because of this theoretical and cultural focus on pleasure, the traditional protectionist approach seen in the majority of media literacy programs evolved during this time, and began to “alternate between protecting young people from the dangers of the media and celebrating their use and manipulation of the media"lxxxvi. I have
sometimes fallen into this pattern myself when I have taught media literacy to girls in a
workshop setting; it is no simple task to avoid when time is limited, and it is one that
educators must be mindful of if they are to transcend this simplistic view of subjectivity
in their curricula. Simply protecting youth from the media or celebrating their use of it
does little to encourage them to understand the nuances that exist between these two
opposing attitudes. Progressive, empowering media literacy should seek to inhabit these
spaces.
34 The media loses its ability to function as an unquestioned ideological force if we
can heighten our critical eye towards it. Teaching media literacy in a harm reduction
framework that encourages critique while allowing for pleasure and focusing throughout
on the agency and productive energy of young women is key. Educators must move
beyond simply protecting girls from the media, or encouraging them to embrace the
pleasures it may offer. Through encouraging dialogue, and critical thought in education,
we can equip students with the mental and tactical skills to wake up, to talk back. This
reframes both media and education as potential sites for empowerment.
Better integrating protection and celebration, and revamping media literacy
curricula to operate in a harm reduction framework would validate adolescent experience,
while equipping teens with the tools to critique the texts they encounter. Kids won’t stay
offline or away from television. Trusting them to be critical decision makers can be an
empowering act. Viewing media literacy in this way enables a “balance between
appreciation and skepticism, or pleasure and danger”lxxxvii.
An ideal curriculum exists in the space between pleasure and danger, between individualism and connectivity. Harm reduction frameworks, when employed, can foster an environment that respects student agency. As we see below, however, today’s curricula operate in a variety of situations, each with distinct institutional and budgetary constraints. Many of the subtleties of modern theory are often eschewed in the classroom, and production and criticism can be more thoroughly integrated in most cases.
35 Chapter 6: Curricula
The many curricula that I examined in my research are here roughly divided into three categories, based on the organizations that authored them. The first few were taught in the public school system; one from Maryland, one from California, and one from Virginia. Secondly are curricula from several small non-profit organizations; some have larger curricula, and some teach students with limited time in the classroom. These latter lesson plans read more like workshops. A mix of grants most often funds these organizations, but the work of writing the curricula is usually unpaid. The limited classroom time and lack of funds affects the ability of the instructor to cover a great depth of content in their pedagogy. Lastly, I look at the work of a handful of larger, well known non-profit programs, whose curricula are developed in conjunction with corporate philanthropy. The students being taught by these programs are sometimes self-selected, and the resources afforded to the programs obviously affect the kind of education offered.
Both of these factors can shift the overall environment of the classroom and the content of the curriculum.
These categorizations are based loosely on the size and structure of the organization in which they were taught. The public school curricula eschew any political content, and are also the most surveiled. The small non-profit curricula are the most overtly concerned with social justice, but vary wildly in length and scope. The corporately sponsored curricula are very intelligently written, but are openly funded by big business. As detailed below, all of these frameworks have benefits and limitations.
36 Public School
“Lights, Camera Literacy” is a curriculum that was authored and instituted in a suburban Maryland middle school in 2007. This curriculum focuses mostly on film production and semiotics, aiming to bestow literacy by fostering an understanding of the link between scripts and films. This focus on only one type of media demonstrates a
“lack of [general] media knowledge"lxxxviii on the part of the curriculum author. Without contextualizing film studies in the larger category of media studies, the students may not bridge the gap between genres, or understand the reach of media studies, generally. The most striking thing in the curriculum, however, is the overwhelming presence of the
“Standards of Learning” checklists and reportage sheets. The bureaucracy of the public educational system is thus present in every lesson, often taking up more pages than the content.
The “Film Club” curriculum from California was used in both a high school and a middle school. The curriculum was written in 2009, the year it was taught. Focusing primarily on production, the curriculum experiments with different genres; commercials and documentaries among them. Cover sheets with objectives and the California standards are seen throughout, but their presence is less overwhelming than in the
Maryland curriculum.
The “Education Arts Technology” is a curriculum that was developed by a non- profit media television station for use in the public school system. Allowing the station to retain its non-profit status, this curriculum, with an accompanying educator, was contracted out to various schools in Virginia. In an era of tightened budgets for
37 educational entities, schools often opt to contract organizations or companies for “special topic” instruction. Focusing on story development, the E.A.T. curriculum breaks down the production process into organized roles for students, and encourages them to participate in “active viewing” so that they can better inform their own practice. This professionally authored lesson plan is the closest any of the public school curricula get to holistic media literacy as defined through a balance between theory and practice in the classroom.
The reportage methods in the first two curricula can be seen as demonstrative of larger distrust towards public educators; the state surveils their activity, and constrains their ability to author transformative learning experiences. “No Child Left Behind” federal legislation has contributed to the micromanagement of teachers in the state system. Standardized testing and massified curricula have thusly taken the place of individual attention, and standardization "generally reveal[s] a school's ability to train students how to take tests, rather than what they have learned as students"lxxxix. Perhaps because they are instituted in a climate of scrutiny, all of these curricula abstain from any critical discourse on race, physicality, gender, or privilege.
The public education system is generally unconcerned with issues like feminism and social justice. Typically, we are raised to view the system as “as a neutral environment purged of ideology, where teachers [are] respectful of the ‘conscience’ and
‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them”xc. However, to ignore identity politics is to further marginalize oppressed communities in the classroom. Public education is sponsored by the state, which in turn is shaped by capitalism. Neither of
38 these forces has a vested interest in acknowledging and counteracting hegemonic stratification.
All of these curricula presume access to resources, but they are all written for implementation in specific settings, where the drafting of the program budget coincides with the development of the curricula. It is clear, for instance, that the authors of the
EAT curriculum presume that a certain base level of production equipment would be available at every school that the lesson plans were presented in.
The educational system has always been just that; part of "the system". As Louis
Althusser explained in 1970, the public school functions as an ideological state apparatusxci, where children acquire an understanding of their “place” in social hegemony, and knowledge of their relationship to the state. In recent years, shrinking budgets and bureaucratic red tape have increasingly paralyzed substantive change from within this system. A critically thinking citizenry needs to be fostered and encouraged.
This is the work of radical media literacy, developed outside of the public system, like the non-profit lesson plans I will now turn to.
Small Non-Profit Curricula
The “Teaching Tolerance” lessons offered by the Southern Poverty Law Center in
Alabama are crafted with an overt social justice interest in mind. The lesson plans are a bit intellectually underwhelming; they encourage 9-12th graders to develop a media portfolio of snipped advertisements, seemingly for no other purpose than to have them.
They carry an awareness of appearance-based media imagery and beauty standards, but
39 the inclusion of race or other identity markers seems left up to the discretion of the instructor. However, they encourage dialogue about the “carefully crafted” nature of media messages. This combination of factors makes for a curriculum that seems to border on a consciousness about hegemony, but leaves much to be desired in terms of acknowledging the various kinds of oppressive structures that exist.
The New Mexico Media Literacy Project (N.M.M.L.P.) explains that everything in the media has an “angle”, and that the ability to create media is directly related to privilege and access to resources, which paints media as a social justice issue. The Third
Wave Foundation supplies part of its funding, specifically the Girl Tech Collective for women of color, which combines critical literacy with introductory production. The critical literacy framework is shared under Creative Commons licensing, but the Girl
Tech Collective’s curriculum appears to be unavailable for public consumption. Gauging from their website, the lessons in production utilize flip cameras. This type of integration of media critique and production is invaluable, because it begins to integrate theory with practice and enable students to put new ideas into place.
Beyond Media Education, from Chicago, includes a curriculum that borrows heavily from the N.M.M.L.P., and is designed for 7th-12th grade girls. This three-lesson curriculum focuses around news and commercials, but includes an expansive definition of “violence”. Their definition includes non-physical manifestations, which is useful in a social justice-oriented environment. The Beyond Media Education curriculum focuses primarily on criticism, but has a lesson in which girls create videos with flip cams. On the website for the organization, however, they profess to have a more balanced split between critical thinking and informed practice, which perhaps manifests itself in settings
40 where funding allows the purchase of more equipment. This curriculum is framed usefully, and there is potential for fusion between theory and practice.
Girls Rock Camps are perhaps some of the least-structured sites for the development of girl-oriented media literacy. This can be a double-edged sword.
Allowing flexibility for each local chapter to invent it’s own workshop can be fantastic, provided that everyone is on the same page about basics. One of the hour-long workshops for Girls Rock Chicago and Washington, D.C. that I taught focused around authorship in advertisements, and the other focused on getting the girls to produce their own short documentary-style interviews. The Girls Rock ethos is useful; the emphasis is on active participation, safety, community, inclusion, and non-hierarchical learning. The structure of the camps does not conform to a centralized set of standards. At the camps
I’ve been to, volunteers craft the media workshops; anyone who is interested can try their hand at it, which obviously can have good and bad ramifications, depending on the background, bias, and knowledge of the instructor. The overall objective of the camp is great – to create a welcoming environment where discussions about acknowledging difference are encouraged. The lessons, however, are meant to be adaptable to all ages 8-
18, which limits the amount of advanced concepts one can include.
It is unclear how expansive the N.M.M.L.P.’s curriculum is, but the other non- profit curricula mentioned above seem small in scope. Although they focus on important concepts, and begin to integrate theory and practice, all of them only seem to engage students for one or two workshop sessions each. Often volunteer-run, these kinds of programs do not usually have the resources to write and implement a larger and more
41 comprehensive curriculum. Two exceptions to this are the Ghandi Brigade and Free
Spirit Media, the latter of which appears in the next section.
The Ghandi Brigade’s curriculum is based around technical skills, but is the only curriculum that delves into the concepts behind editing proficiency. Editing is practically one half of technical production knowledge, and it’s not something that’s easily taught, especially without a hefty resource budget. The Ghandi Brigade curriculum has been utilized to foster connections between American-born students, and adolescents native to
South American countries, in order to facilitate the telling of their stories. Although not overtly mentioned in the written curriculum, the Ghandi Brigade’s structure aligns it with empowerment and social justice.
The Free Spirit Media curriculum is the most comprehensive and expansive of the independently authored, non-profit curricula. The organization has only been in existence since 2000, so it is comparatively young. (The N.M.M.L.P. has formed in
1993, and Teaching Tolerance began in 1991.) Free Spirit Media is funded by a combination of sources; corporations and individuals. Nicki Minaj, Love and Basketball,
Trey Songs, and a slew of advertisements are employed as texts for reference across this four-lesson curriculum, which demonstrates the curriculum’s engagement with contemporary media. Free Spirit Media also teaches production, but its critical literacy curriculum is comprehensive, including racism, sexism, ageism, classism, heterosexism and ableism on its list of discussion topics.
These curricula are all relatively brief, and overtly concerned with social inequity.
Funding for non-profits is difficult to come by, and the approaches that each organization has to this problem clearly shape its ability to author and implement substantive and
42 transformative media education material. The relationships with foundations that are outlined below, however, reside on large-ticket sums. The pros and cons of these types of arrangements are discussed below.
Foundation Curricula
Two curricula that depend on single, large corporate donors are Girls,
Incorporated and Reel Girls. The Reel Girls curriculum was developed by Adobe Youth
Voices, and the Girls, Incorporated curriculum was authored by the Time Warner
Foundation. Both of these curricula, as well as the public school curriculum, are considered proprietary. I managed to obtain a copy of the Girls, Incorporated curriculum on loan, but the Adobe Youth Voices curriculum is unavailable without a purchased subscription to their site.
Girls, Incorporated began developing their curriculum around 1995, with “Girls
Re-Cast TV”, and “Girls Get the Message” in 2002. Some of the older curricula were lambasted by Mary Celeste Kearney in her 2006 book for demonstrating a “lack of exposure to or training in contemporary theories”xcii. Although lengthy and impressively meticulous, the “Girls Take Another Look” curriculum I acquired only focuses on the stereotypical portrayals of women in the media. This curriculum is intelligently written for implementation across a range of settings, so production lessons aren’t necessarily feasible to include. However, the focus on beauty, though important, overshadows other kinds of conclusions the girls could be forming about the media, and doesn’t take much about their subjectivity into account. Some of the smaller curricula seem more open-
43 ended in their framework. The Girls, Incorporated curriculum’s heavy focus on beauty standards feels like it may preclude other discussions in the classroom, like those centered on race or class diversity.
The curricula I have discussed range in depth, structure and funding. Each is situated uniquely in the framework and constraints of its parent organization. Among the best qualities these curricula offer are flexibility for use of various media, development of an empowerment framework, and the incorporation of production into the literacy curriculum. All of these are dependent upon the source and amount of funding the program is receiving. The majority of these programs are funded by sources outside of the public school system. It is to a discussion of the sources and their histories that we turn to next.
44 Chapter 7: Funding and Sustainability
In one way or another, foundation dollars fund the majority of the media literacy curricula that are in use in the United States today. Public schools often rely on curricula written by non-profit entities, and small and large non-profit organizations alike are usually at least partially funded by foundation money. Taking this into account, it is important for any media literacy educator to understand the history and development of the corporate philanthropy movement in the United States. We risk hypocrisy in our lessons if we do not endeavor to understand these processes. Media literacy is inherently concerned with funding, objective, and authorship; as educators of this subject we must be reflexive about how our programs fit into the capitalist system.
History and Formation of Corporate Philanthropy
The Tax Reform Act of 1969 was perhaps the catalyst for the formation of what we now understand as the non-profit industrial complexxciii. Foundations, often formed in conjunction with larger capitalist entities, donate money to goals and causes that support their mission statement, with a tax break in corporate profits as an exchange. By giving money to a non-profit “cause” they simultaneously help shape their company’s image and appear as altruistic entities in the eyes of the public. This framework is the foundation for the non-profit industrial complex.
The truth of the matter is that there are “cosmetic adjustments to make capitalist foundations appear progressive and the Left complicit in supporting systems of
45 oppression, exploitation, and domination”xciv, but the bottom line is profit. The Non-
Profit Industrial Complex (N.P.I.C.) is not radically different from private corporations, and the N.P.I.C. is the context in which foundations exist. The bigger the company, the more likely it is that the “free” money or social services it’s doling out is ultimately the fruit of outsourced labor exploitation. Although we are used to thinking of philanthropy as inherently progressive, there are foundations and non-profits that span the length of the political spectrum. Not-for-profit organizations are not inherently progressive or radical, and they are just as capable of existing because of unethical labor practices as for-profit corporations are.
Corporate philanthropy proliferated in incidence and scope in the United States throughout the 1900s. In 1999, Paul Newman founded the Committee Encouraging
Corporate Philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy and “hybrid” non-profit and for-profit business models are now commonplace in the United States. Now, since the onset of what is being called “late-stage” capitalism, the government can’t afford to educate critical thinkers, literally and figuratively, and children are often being dumped into the laps of multinational corporations at an early age. The corporate interest in education is dubious at best, and the funding for media literacy programs our three rough categories must be examined.
Public School Funding
In the public school system, the availability of state funds for the development of curricula often comes with the price of state surveillance. This, coupled with the
46 adherence to an ideologically “neutral” agenda can inhibit the ability of the curricula to truly encourage critical thinking about our society. Initial investments of public money can fund the acquisition of equipment, which enables students to experience media production and literacy together. This kind of funding can also fuel the authoring of expansive curricula. However, underpaid educators often lack the time to rework their lessons between classroom sessions.
Budget cuts and the shrinking of social service government programs have made media literacy in public schools a short-lived project. Even in cases where equipment has been purchased, many public schools have begun to outsource their “special topic” curricula to places like the Kennedy Center’s Changing Education Through the Arts programs, or the E.A.T. Curriculum discussed earlier. This combination of organizational sponsorship and public education is bewildering at best, and begs the question about what, exactly, is given in return for a curriculum.
These types of hybrid educational arrangements directly tie corporate philanthropy to public services, often involving multinational corporate entities in the process. Small non-profits concerned with media literacy are of little interest to large corporate backers. They may lack sustainable funding and have less time with students than a program utilized in the public school system, but they are often able to more deliberately frame their brief curricula around social justice and empowerment.
47 Small Non-Profit Funding
Small nonprofits may not have the initial funding to write expansive curricula, but
their flexibility and the transformative potential of their lesson plans are visible. The
small non-profits that are dedicated to media literacy are often able to write from a more
ideologically radical place than public educators. However, as these non-profits have
grown, “valuable time [becomes] spent on securing cozy relationships with major donors
instead of organizing to dismantle… systems of oppression”xcv, so resources spent on writing curricula, or the ability to maintain radical content may become scarce as an organization increases in size.
Large sums of non-profit money are available only to those who are able to navigate acquiring 501C3 status, and sustain energy while meeting with board members who monitor their activities. Indeed, “many took jobs in this sector to avoid working in the corporate sector and to work in solidarity with those at the bottom [of hegemony, but] the professionalization and corporatization of the non-profit sector, coupled with the expanding needs of the population and decreasing government funding, meant that many became disillusioned and burned-out from the demands of the work”xcvi. This may result
in a curriculum ceasing to be reworked as the priorities of an organization shift to
fundraising.
In part because of the difficulty involved in gaining access to large non-profit
funding sources, the ability to pay theoretically astute educators to consistently revamp
and rework lesson plans within small nonprofits is rare. Sustainability is a concern
everywhere in the non-profit world, and everywhere in education; media literacy
48 programs for girls are no exception. Although the short scope of many of the small non- profit programs leaves them with curricula that are by design flexible in nature, their brief time with students can make their engagement with the subject matter less in-depth.
Their programs can also be subject to the same pitfalls as those written in the public school system; struggling to maintain funding may decrease the relevance of a curriculum over time.
Foundation Funding
Although founded with an empowerment framework, many girl-centered organizations are grappling with funding struggles in the same way that the public school system is. Both entities are beginning to outsource curricula authorship to corporate foundations. As media-related businesses that understand the inner-workings of the industry, Adobe and Time Warner are obviously qualified to author in-depth and sustainably funded media curricula. However, without an investigation of the companies themselves, students may miss out on the ideas behind a media literacy that truly concerns itself with ideas of authorship. An ad in Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” showed a young girl facing the onslaught of exploitative images of women and suggested that mothers talk to their daughters “before the beauty industry does,” but failed to mention, of course, that parent company Unilever is brand owner of several beauty products as well as the Slim-Fast diet product”xcvii. When mixed messages like this come from the same company, capitalist gains are truly the bottom line, and we do ourselves a disservice to forget that.
49 The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty started in 2004, and Adobe and Time
Warner are major players in the girl “empowerment” programming today. These philanthropy programs arguably do some good, but in some respects they are little more than strategic marketing campaigns. Reel Girls had their funding cut when a student posted criticism of their corporate sponsor on Twitterxcviii; who knows what other ramifications these kinds of arrangements could carry.
Pervasiveness of Private Money in Education
In all three models, we see the presence of foundation money. We have clearly reached a point where “multinationals have become bigger sources of global aid than states”xcix. The privatization of the school system will most likely increase program funding, but fostering critique about the inner workings of capitalism is sticky and difficult to find backing for, especially when corporations are footing the bill. The move towards outsourcing curriculum development by public schools and large non-profits may have negative side effects, but increased investment has obvious salutary effects on the scale and resources that a program can offer. When education and politicians have become openly funded by big business, educators must remain mindful of who pays their salary, and what curricular constraints their sponsorship implies.
It should be acknowledged that fundraising is similar, in a sense, to consumption
– and “ethical consumption is difficult to sustain when, for example, numerous items with distinct production histories are bundled together, as in electrical equipment”c.
There is no way to ascertain where every fundraising dollar comes from, or know the
50 ethical history of every backer one engages with. However, if we are concerned with media literacy, we are hypocrites if we do not engage with funding sources in a manner that is backed by an ethical argument based in a healthy skepticism. Educators must set an example by remaining openly self-reflexive about the programming they author and apply, especially when the end goal is fostering critical thinking in their students.
51 Chapter 8: Conclusion
“The freedom to participate in culture is contingent on both freedom from
prohibition and freedom to act via political, economic, and media capacities.”ci
In many cases, relatively low overhead and the independence from state structures allow smaller non-profits to write more transformative and flexible curricula. These organizations don’t often have the resources to write an entire semester’s worth of material, but their geographic and temporal specificity is essential to effective media education. Attitudes and importance of particular issues is often specific to time and place; understanding context is part of media literacy. It is debatable whether or not a truly engaging and transformative syllabus can even be implemented nationally. Keeping the curriculum local and contextual makes smaller programs more sustainable with little to no funding, allowing them to directly serve the communities they are embedded in.
When compensation is low or nonexistent, however, it may make for a less sustainable organization, or a less theoretically knowledgeable curriculum author. This seems as though it may have been the reason for Kearney’s harsh criticism of the early Girls, Inc. curricula. Although more funding can equal more access to equipment and a better chance that a curriculum will be revisited between uses, the smaller non-profit programs I have researched have proven that much can be done on a small budget.
Revisiting and revising critical media literacy curricula is essential to their relevance; the public school system simply does not provide enough textual flexibility for adaptations, and mass-implemented corporately-created curricula are often left unrevised,
52 causing them to fall back to protectionist logic and out-of date theories. Context in discourse as well as context in community must be maintained and expressed; curricula that allow for the use of different texts can make for a more consistently engaging program. A large concern about the girl-empowerment organizations that were founded around the mainstream panic about adolescent female self-esteem is that they are threatened with succumbing to what Kristin Bumiller refers to as “mainstreaming”cii, or the dilution of their radical frameworks in order to appease potential donors. In order to retain its salience, media literacy needs to be as geographically and temporally contextual as possible.
Making a curriculum that moves theoretically past engaging beauty standards is essential to keeping girls interested. If we continue to focus girl-empowerment media curricula primarily on appearance, “the fact that so many girl directors use their
[resulting] films to explore topics like beauty standards and body image [should] not [be] surprising”ciii. The time has come to move beyond these topics to contemporary theory in order to keep engaging the students. Engaging a critique of visual culture can be done through investigating popular ideas about beauty initially, but in order for media literacy curricula to remain relevant, they must endeavor to expand with theoretical developments.
Scholars like Inderpal Grewal and Chandra Mohanty are currently contributing to the discourse on media and diaspora, while scholars like Michael Kimmel and Judith
Halberstam have continued to complicate our understandings of gender. Ideas about embracing pleasure in subjugation have given way to subjectively-situated media critiques that entertain both pleasure and danger, demonstrating that “there are battles still
53 to be fought, and won”civ within media representations. Valuable understandings of media literacy as “different strategies of viewing, reading, and locating “self” within representational systems and disparate life-worlds that aim to displace or occlude a minority subject”cv are coming into being. These ideas, as well as bodies of knowledge about “reality” televisioncvi and the emerging field of cell phone literacy are crucial to stay on top of if we are to consistently challenge students. The scope of these ideas still includes critique of dominant ideas about beauty, but the body of media theory has clearly become more multifaceted, and media literacy programs should follow suit.
The vast majority of media literacy curricula for teens have also eschewed an examination of the systemic. Realizing social context and commonalities can help students connect their lives to one another, and to the larger national and global communities. Our current climate of “neoliberalism… places an emphasis on self- improvement, self-correction, and individual empowerment over social change or state support”cvii. If concerned with context as well as individual perception, media literacy can foster an understanding of how the specific can often link to large-scale social phenomena, which means that programs could be actively seeking to develop as sites for solidarity building.
In keeping with the ideas of current theory, media literacy programs should be careful about how they position their attitudes towards media on the spectrum between pleasure and danger. In hooks’s discussion of black female spectators, she says that “to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism”cviii. The same can be said for experiencing cinematic pleasure from a position of gender, class, size or ability awareness. Jessica Valenti, on the other
54 hand, states that, “it’s fine to go along with [social norms and pop culture] to a certain extent, so long as you’re always cognizant of why you’re doing it”cix. Framing critical media literacy in the context of harm reduction can help students develop a critical eye, but still permit and encourage them to engage with and take pleasure in the media- saturated world they know.
Theoretical and critical media theory is important to understand. However, “does criticism succeed in warding off the harmful effects indicated by quantitative work?”cx.
Theory is only half of the equation; resources for production must be sought after as well.
We have to remember that, “consumer activism will always be an irritant rather than a systemic counter to corporate destructiveness. For one thing, “consumer democracy” gives the wealthy more votes than the poor”cxi. In this context, media literacy and production have got to be taught concurrently in order for the largest benefits to be reaped. Teaching girls to be cultural producers is part of the activist project of the third wave of feminism. Embracing this is something that media literacy education should aim for if possible.
Throughout the history of contemporary feminism, media theorists have implored women to become agents of change. Laura Mulvey calls for women to take control of production and “conceive a new language of desire”cxii. Kaplan demands a “move beyond the preoccupation with how women have been constructed in patriarchal cinema”cxiii. hooks and Halberstam both ask us to imagine worlds in which our identities can be both transgressivecxiv, and self-authoredcxv. Although the importance of reading and deconstructing media texts has been embraced by activist organizations, this is only half of the equation.
55 Talking back and participating in dialogue is the first step towards being heard.
Tech curricula are especially important for women and girls, because “technology has been naturalized as masculine”cxvi. Finding the resources to implement both kinds of instruction is difficult, but being able to participate in a feedback loop of informed production and active critical dialogue can bolster both the girls’ sense of solidarity, and their prowess as media makers. Demystifying production goes a step beyond learning to critique the products and create points of access for subversive voices to be heard.
Broadening curricula to include contemporary theory, keeping them contextual, operating from a harm reduction framework, and integrating theory with informed practice are all the provinces of truly radical media literacy. Encouraging students to be aware of the structures that provide their education is also important; corporate philanthropy may provide fantastic resources, but what are the implications for critical dialogue? Keeping girls engaged with more than just their appearances can truly make them more literate, socially aware members of society. Giving them the tools to project their ideas, while a more demanding project, will surely yield results that are beyond our wildest imaginations.
56 Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Continuum, 1969.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
Beltran, Mary C.. “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive.” Cinema Journal. 44:2 (2005): 50-64.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Soziale Ungleichheiten. (1983): 183-198.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. “”Fasting Girls”: Reflections on Writing the History of Anorexia Nervosa.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 50.4/5 (1985): 93-104.
Bumiller, Kristin. In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008.
Butler, Allison. Media Education Goes to School. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009.
Clark, Jessica and Tracy Van Slyke. Beyond the Echo Chamber: How a Networked Progressive Media Can Reshape American Politics. New York: The New Press. 2010.
57 Counihan, Carole. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. Florence: Routlege, 1999.
Davis, Angela Y. “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia.” Critical Inquiry. 21:3 (1994): 37-43.
DeBord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso, 1988.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
Douglas, Susan. “Women and the Media”. We the Media, A Citizens Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy. Don Hazen and Julie Winkour, eds. New York: The New Press. 1997. 120-121.
Fowles, Jib. Advertising and Popular Culture. London: Sage, 1996.
Frank, Katherine. “Primetime Harem Fantasies: Marriage, Monogamy, and a bit of Feminist Fanfiction on ABC’s The Bachelor.” Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box. New York: Tauris, 2007.
Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Caimbridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2005.
Halberstam, Judith. "The Transgender Gaze." Screen 42:3 (2001): 294–298.
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
58 Hobbs, Renee. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. Washington: The Aspen Institute, 2010.
hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice”. The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. 4.1 (1991): 1-12.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Cambridge: South End Press, 1999. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge: South End Press, 2009.
Johnson, Merri Lisa. “Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television Studies.” Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box. New York: Tauris, 2007.
Kaplan, Ann. “Is the Gaze Male?.” Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Methuen, 1983.
Kearney, Mary Celeste. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kilbourne, Jean. Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising. Florence: Free Press, 1999.
Kitch, Carolyn. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Klite, Paul. “Pavlov’s TV Dog: A Snapshot of Local TV News in America.” We The
59 Media: A Citizens Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy. Eds. Don Hazen and Julie Wingkur. New York: The New Press, 1996. 103-104.
Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kieran Kelly. New Media: a Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2009.
Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Masnick, Mike. "Comcast Pulls Its Sponsorship For Reel Grrls Over A Tweet, Learns How Not To Do PR." Techdirt.com. Techdirt, 20 May 2011. Web. 03 May 2012.
McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers, eds. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Routledge, 2003.
Mcluhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2001.
Milkie, Melissa. “Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: The Impact of Pervasive Beauty Images on Black and White Girls’ Self-Concepts.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62:2 (199): 190-210.
Miller, Toby. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16:3 (1975): 6-18.
60 Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Penguin Group: 1994.
Power, Nina. One Dimensional Woman. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Pozner, Jennifer. Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010.
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation: and Other Essays. New York: Picador. 2001.
Stacey, Judith. “Can There Be A Feminist Ethnography?” Women’s Studies International Forum. 11:1 (1988): 53-59.
Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Berkley, Seal Press, 2007.
Walker, Rebecca. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.
West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Eds Russel Ferguson, Martha Grever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
Zaslow, Emilie. Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
61 Endnotes i hooks “theory”, 5 ii West, 6 iii Kearney, 122 iv Kearney, 101 v Sontag, 5 (quoting Nietzsche) vi Bourdieu, 1 vii Kaplan, 46 viii hooks, 51 ix Walker, xxxi x McLuhan, 44 xi Sobchack, 140 xii Miller xiii Incite, 123 xiv McLuhan, 50 xv Kitch xvi Kitch, 5 xvii Sobchack, 142 xviii Lister, 100 xix Bourdieu, 3 xx McCaughey and Ayers, 122 xxi McCaughy and Ayers, 129 xxii Gill, 114 xxiii Hall, 71 xxiv Gill xxv DeBord, 24 xxvi Douglas, 121 xxvii Lister, 219 xxviii Marcuse, 6 xxix McLuhan, 24 xxx McLuhan, 26 xxxi Mulvey, 6 xxxii Doane, 63 xxxiii Gill in Zaslow, 62 xxxiv Kaplan, 41 xxxv Kaplan, 36 xxxvi hooks gaze, 94 xxxvii hooks gaze, 99 xxxviii Halberstam, 13 xxxix Halberstam, 10 xl Halberstam, 11 xli Muñoz xlii Johnson, 22 xliii Hall, 66 xliv Hall, 67
62 xlv DeBord, 17 xlvi Fowles, 160 xlvii Fowles, 152 xlviii Kilbourne, 309 xlix Kilbourne, 295 l hooks, 123 li Grewal, 7 lii hooks, looks 21 liii Beltran, 54 liv Beltran, 52 lv Beltran, 58 lvi The former focuses on contextualizing horror in the wake of gender anxiety, and the latter focuses on various interpretations of Barbie. lvii Stacey (Margaret Mead’s earlier work also touched on this.) lviii Klite, 103 lix Althusser, 21 lx Gill, 164 lxi Pozner, 15 lxii Pozner, 11 lxiii Frank, 109 lxiv Adorno and Horkheimer, 4 lxv Clark and Van Slyke, 198 lxvi Althusser, 34 lxvii Klite, 103 lxviii Counihan, 94 lxix Brumberg, 102 lxx Kearney, 103 lxxi Kearney, 23 lxxii Douglas lxxiii Kearney, 97 lxxiv Pipher, 27 lxxv Marcus, 189 lxxvi Pipher, 27 lxxvii Kearney, 97 lxxviii Kearney, 40 lxxix Marcus, 167 lxxx Marcus, 112 lxxxi Kearney, 99 lxxxii Kearney, 107 lxxxiii Zaslow, 31 lxxxiv Davis, 41 lxxxv Johnson, 16 lxxxvi Butler, 5 lxxxvii Johnson, 19 lxxxviii Butler, 14
63 lxxxix Butler, 15 xc Althusser, 21 xci Althusser xcii Kearney, 93 xciii Incite xciv Incite, 80 xcv Incite, 85 xcvi Incite, 139 xcvii Zaslow, 84 xcviii Masnick xcix Miller, 48 c Miller, 11 ci Miller ,73 cii Bumiller, 15 ciii Kearny, 221 civ Power, 3 cv Munoz, 26 cvi Pozner cvii Zaslow, 158 cviii hooks gaze, 98 cix Valenti, 57 cx Milkie, 192 cxi Miller, 11 cxii Mulvey, 8 cxiii Kaplan, 45 cxiv hooks gaze, 104 cxv Halberstam, 29 cxvi Kearney, 199
64