We can only understand 'hot' by contrasting it with its ..

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Representation, race, stereotypes, and the media

• November 15-20, 2006

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The power of representation

• Power is not only political, governmental,
  physical
• It can also be wielded via communication
• Who gets to speakand not speak
• Who decides how things are described or visually
  depicted
• That is, how things are represented

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The power of representationand the media

• The CS claim
• Media images dont (merely) capture some
  pre-existent category distinction
• They create (or, at least, reinforce) those very
  distinctions
• Representationsvisual and linguistic
  communicationsare what categorize people to
  begin with

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Categorization

• A naturalarguably, even necessaryhuman
  cognitive process
• We notice patterns/similarities
• We place items that are similar (or pattern
  similarly) into categories
• We name the categories
• Could we even get out of bed in the morning
  without our categories?

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Whats the first thing we ask when we hear
someones had a baby?

• Why must we know which sex category the baby
  falls into?
• (Will we really treat a newborn differently on
  the basis of our ability to categorize its sex?)
• (Maybe we will!)

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Categories what we say

• Classical categories US senators
• Graded categories tall men
• Radial categories birds, mothers
• Flowers vs. weeds

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Difference why our fascination with otherness?

• Some scholarly explanations
• Structural linguistics difference is essential
  to meaning
• We can only understand hot by contrasting it
  with its opposite, cold
• (i.e., hot not cold)
• The difference between two concepts is what
  constitutes its meaning

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Whats the problem with such binaries?

• Reductive (over-simplified)
• The world isnt (only) black and white
• Many shades of gray between
• All distinctions are swallowed up

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Another problem with binaries

• Jacques Derrida
• Very few neutral binary oppositions
• One member of the binary is usually dominant
  there is a relation of power
• White/black
• Men/women
• Upper class/lower class

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Another theoretical explanation dialogism

• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Meaning only comes about through the process of
  dialogue
• Our meanings are shaped, refined, through the
  differences between participants
• The other, then is essential to meaning
• But meaning can never be finally fixed

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An anthropological argument

• Cultures mark difference in order to createand
  stabilizesocial structure
• Difference, then, isnt neutral
• Classification systems are inherently evaluative
  as systems of hierarchy
• Good/bad, proper/improper, us/them,
  acceptable/forbidden

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But with all this said

• Categorization, classification, and even
  gradation seem to be inescapableinnate?human
  traits
• So lets look at how we do these things
• And what happens when we do

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Categories of people types

• Types general and necessary classifications
• When we type, we
• Link or assign people/things/events to general
  classificatory schemes into whichaccording to
  our culturethey fit
• And so we can understand or make sense of a
  particular item in terms of its type

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Some salient types

• Roles they might play
• student, truck driver, doctor, parent, girlfriend
• Groups they might belong to
• male/female
• white/black/other
• American/Chinese/French
• Personality
• Other types?

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A type, then

• Simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped, widely
  recognized characterization
• In which a few traits are foregrounded

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As a result of typing a person

• Our mental picture of who the person is is
  constructed from the combination of
  classifications
• Is this a problem?
• Is this a good thing?

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From typing to stereotyping

• Like types, stereotypes also rely on the
• simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped, widely
  recognized characteristics about a person

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But types become stereotypes when they

• Reduce
• Reduce everything about the person to those
  simple, vivid traits
• Exaggerate
• Magnify or caricature the traits
• Simplify
• Strip characteristics of individuality or
  subtlety
• Fix them
• Without acknowledging changes, developments,
  passage of time, societal change

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Representing (typing) race in the media
available strategies then/now

• Stereotyped representationsbut more on these
  later
• Invisibility
• Race (i.e., other races) as problem
• Other object, not subject
• Assimilationism
• Ambiguity
• New aesthetics

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Some print images (Halls book)

• Page 227 how do we read this image?
• Whats noteworthy about the people in the photo?
• Why heroes?
• Why villains?
• Literal/denotative meaning 100-meter final, Ben
  Johnson in front
• Connotative meaning ambiguous

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Some more ambiguity Linford Christie, 1992

• Photo on p. 229
• What is the moment of triumph celebrating?
• Personal victory?
• Victory for UK?
• Victory for (all) black people?
• You can be both black and British?

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Race, gender, and sexuality

• Page 231 spectacle of otherness
• Page 233 what does this picture of US athlete
  Carl Lewis say?
• Sexual message(s)
• Racial message(s)

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Lets look at some electronic images

• Crash
• Grays AnatomyLets compare and contrast how
  race is represented in these two texts
• and, for the time being, lets not talk about
  stereotypes

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Challenge situating race in Crash

• What race is Thandie Newtons character?
• How did you type her?
• How does the Matt Dillon character type her?
• How does the character type herself?

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Representations as constitutive of race

• Claim of CS
• Race does not pre-exist its naming (or its
  analysis)
• That is, race is not a natural, scientific, or
  biological category
• Not a fact of the objective world
• Rather, it only is a category because we create
  it discursively

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Media representations, specifically

• How is race portrayed in media?
• Visually race is (claimed to be made) visible
  via observable physical characteristics
• Skin color
• Hair texture
• Shapes/dimensions of facial features
• Body types and body parts

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The fluidity of white

• NYC 1840s
• NYC 1880s
• New Mexico 1912 (and today)

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Recap stereotypes are

• Reductive
• Exaggerated
• Simplified/simplistic
• Fixed As a result, what do stereotypes do?

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What stereotypes do

• Deploy a strategy of splitting
• They divide the normal from abnormal, acceptable
  from unacceptable
• And then exclude/expel what falls in the
  abnormal or unacceptable

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Thus, stereotyping creates and maintains

• Symbolic order
• Acceptable and unacceptable images
• Social order
• Binding and bonding together of us and
  segregation of them
• The them group is abjected (thrown out)
• Symbolically, societally, or both

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The paradoxes of stereotyping

• They usually serve as cognitive short-cuts
• Some psychologists define stereotypes as
  schemas
• Cognitive structures that contain a perceivers
  knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about human
  groups and their individual members

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But they are not always so simple

• And they can be self-contradictory
• Stereotypes in US of black men
• Not real men, not adults, immature, children
  boys
• Yet also super-men, super-athletes, over-sexed,
  over-endowed hyper-men
• Primitive, simple
• Yet also wily savages

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What Hall says about this

• Blacks are trapped by the binary structure of
  this stereotype
• Children, yet super-men simple, yet wily
• And are obliged to shuttle endlessly between them
• Sometimes even being represented as both poles of
  the binary at the same time

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Thus, stereotypes are themselves binary

• They refer as much to what as imagined (or
  feared) in fantasy
• As to what is real (or derived from typing)

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The cognitive psychology of stereotypes

• One aspect of stereotyping is expectation
• Based on what we do see, we anticipate what we
  expect to see
• The expectation that we should see additional
  features of a schema once we see any features of
  the schema is called priming
• Smoke primes expectations of ?

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Because stereotypes are so pervasive in media

• They are well learned
• And often automatically and unconsciously
  activatedeven if we dont endorse them
• So when we encounter someone of a particular
  social group
• The stereotype (associated characterizations) is
  primed
• And this influences how we process the situation

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Attribution errors

• When we see someone doing something
• Helping an old lady across the stree
• Pushing someone off a bridge
• To what do we attribute their behavior?
• How the person is responding to the specific
  situation?
• Who the person is as an individual?
• What group the person is a member of?

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Cognitive psychologists have found that

• Inferences we make about peoples behaviors are
  biased in favor of our own in groups
• If we someone doing something bad
• If the person is in our in group well
  attribute the bad behavior to external factors
• If the person is in an out group well
  attribute it to internal causes

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Similarly

• If we see someone doing something good
• If the person is in our in group, well think
  it represents just how the guy is
• If the person is in our out group, well think
  the person just had to do it, under the
  circumstances (not a reflection of who the person
  is)
• Does anyone remember the Yahoo News captions
  post-Katrina?