Page 173 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

NATURALISING

With increased migration and mobility, these symbolic markers of a
nation can be the only common ‘heritage’ it has. Certainly, such
markers are ever-more prevalent in the media, a common motif in
advertisements, continuity and the like to propose a euphoric unity
among groups which otherwise display few common traits. Here, the
nation has been appropriated as a ‘user-friendly’ metaphor through
which multi-national firms mobilise not citizens but consumers.
However, it is more vital than ever to make such markers ethnically
inclusive.

See also: Ethnic/ethnicity
Further reading: Anderson (1983); Hartley (1992a)

NATURALISING

The process of representing the cultural and historical as natural.
Naturalising is a distinctive feature of ideological discourses. The
ideological productivity of naturalisation is that circumstances and
meanings that are socially, historically, economically and culturally
determined (and hence open to change) are ‘experienced’ as natural –
that is, inevitable, timeless, universal, genetic (and hence unarguable).
Naturalisation is the prize in modern cultural and signifying
struggles; class or male supremacy, for example, is expressed as natural,
and conversely resistance to that supremacy is represented as unnatural.
So socialist and feminist discourses have to contend both with the
naturalised discourses that continuously encourage us to understand
social relations in ways that reproduce class and gender inequalities,
and with the difficulty of establishing as natural (or as not unnatural)
their alternative discourses and representations. Naturalising, then, is a
force in the maintenance of hegemony.
See also: Hegemony

NATURALISM

A term which is often used as a synonym for realism. It first became
influential in the theatre, where it referred to those modernist plays,
especially Ibsen’s, which tried to do away with signs and replace them
with the objects that such signs had stood for. Thus, a play set in a
living room would be staged with a living room on the stage –

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