Professional Documents
Culture Documents
...and hegemony
When analysing any representation, a good way to start is to decide whether you feel the representation is...
Positive or Negative?
How are the newer colour photographs a different representation from the older black & white images?
Black and white images: Authoritative Respected Helpful Part of the community Working alone Dominant Male Serious Colour images: A significant shift in representations of the police. In these colour images we see the police force represented as multicultural, mixed sex, approachable and friendly. They are represented as working in teams but still as part of the local community.
The representations may make them seem less respected or even vulnerable as we see that in one of the images they are wearing stab proof vests - but this could also represent them as always ready for action.
How do all the representations on the previous slide differ to those below?
Negative Representations:
This is quite a damaging representation of the police, people may mistake the representation of a few incompetent or untrustworthy police to represent the whole of the police force - and in some cases this may even be the intention!
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are not constructed by the media - they are used and they are reinforced by the media. However stereotypes themselves are constructions. And as such they can be analysed and deconstructed.
School stereotypes - your list may have included: The Jock The Bully The Geek The Goth The 'In' crowd The Smelly old teacher The 'try hard' teacher Amongst many others... You also need to think about where you have seen these stereotypes and you'll probably find that they come across a range of different types of media... High School teen comedy movies Soap operas Sit-coms The News Newspapers Adverts Comic books
Regardless of where they come from we will probably all have a shared or similar image in our head of what they look like and what they do.
Here are the four ways in which stereotypes are constructed for the media...
To deconstruct or analyse a stereotype we would mostly look at appearance and behaviour - however the third and fourth parts of the stereotype will still be relevant - to put this into practice, watch the following video on Stereotyping Scousers...
http://youtu.be/-jDSGTO5YiI
To summarise:
Stereotypes are widely circulated ideas or assumptions about particular groups. They are often negative and derogatory but can be sometimes be positive.
They have the following characteristics:
1.They involve both a categorising and an evaluation of the group being stereotyped. 2.They usually emphasise some easily grasped feature(s) of the group, these are often based within appearance, behaviour etc. 3.Stereotypes often try to insist on absolute differences and boundaries where the reality is that groups of people have a spectrum or variety of differences 4.Stereotypes often evaluate groups in a negative way but this may depend on the reading of the audience
Whilst these virals poke fun at a Scouse stereotype, they are pretty harmless - they are intended as gentle humour and whilst Stereotypes may be based on seeds of truth - for example the moustache and permed hair comes from an era in the 1970s and 1980s when many of the Liverpool Football Club team had a similar 'look' - there is no sense that all Scousers look or behave in this way - the comic nature of the viral means that the audience knows not to take them too seriously.
But what happens when other types of media use stereotypes? Can they be negative; can they even be considered damaging?
Consider how similar ideas from the virals are used to reinforce a Scouse stereotype in extremely derogatory ways. Firstly in a single cell comic strip and secondly on the front page of the Sun newspaper after the Hillsborough disaster...
What is hegemony?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrz6mM3kMMs