Page 490 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Women |

are often represented as exceptions, and their presence has been used as an
excuse to criticize and deny the need for feminism. Strong women are often
represented as deviant and dangerous, and tend to get their just deserts in the
end; take Thelma and Louise, for example, in which the two drive themselves
off a cliff at the end of the movie. Sigourney Weaver in Alien, while widely rec-
ognized as the first significant female action hero in the science fiction genre,
is still commodified as a sex object and made available for the male gaze (see
“Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze”). The popular heroine Lara Croft of the vir-
tual game Tomb Raider is another example of a recent crop of tough but highly
eroticized heroines in media texts that provide paradoxical readings. Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, for example, can be read as empowering for women, but also
as a male Lolita fantasy. Nevertheless, the increase in female role models in the
media does provide women and girls with more strong female role models than
ever before.
Feminist critics have increasingly called attention to the ways in which own-
ership issues affect content. They argue that representations of women in the
media will not change substantially until there is significant change in the gen-
der makeup of those who construct and produce media images, as well as those
who make content and hiring decisions. It is hoped that such changes will trans-
form the masculinized culture of contemporary media and the images they pro-
duce, and offer women a diversity of media images that more accurately reflects
them and their experiences.

see also Advertising and Persuasion; Body Image; Dating Shows; Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Representations on TV; Pornography; Re-
ality Television; Representations of Masculinity; Representations of Race; Shock
Jocks; Women’s Magazines.

Further reading: Byerly, Carolyn M., and Karen Ross. Women and Media: A Critical Intro-
duction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006; Carter, Cynthia, G. Branston, and
S. Allan, eds. News, Gender and Power. London: Routledge, 1998; Creedon, Pamela J.,
ed. Women, Media and Sport. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994; Douglas, Susan. Where
the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Random House, 1994;
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York:
Doubleday, 1991; Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in
Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Macdonald, Myra. Representing
Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. New York: Edward Arnold, 1995;
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1989; Norris,
Pippa, ed. Women, Media and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Steiner,
Leslie Morgan, ed. Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their
Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. New York: Random House, 2006; Tuchman, Gaye.
Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978;
Tuchman, Gaye, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet, eds. Hearth and Home: Im-
ages of Women in Mass Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; Wolf, Naomi.
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Women Are Used against Women. New York: William
Morrow, 1991.

Lisa Brooten