Before reading this article, I didn’t know who Ruby Wax was. It’s hard for me to relate her to a famous director or a writer at the first sight of these two photographs. From these two photographs, Ruby Wax is stereotyped to be a beautiful thing, an eloquent thing, and a delicate thing. She is also stereotyped to be a hardworking housewife. She is showed as female as any other normal woman and just as good a wife as any other wife. The journalist conveys such information: the significant difference between her and other women is not her intelligence and success as a director or writer, but she is doing her housework in the glam velvet frock.
2, Placement
This news article is placed on the upper side of page 7 and it takes up 3/4 of this page. The other 1/4 of the page is an advertisement on furniture such as cream chair, four-poster bed and blue vase.
Related to the large photographs of Ruby above, the first impression the whole page gives me is that this is not a news report but an advertisement for something like vacuum machine or furniture. I noticed that there are still quite a lot of news reports about football stars or boxers in that day’s newspaper, but I can hardly find any of them accompany by the advertisement on furniture or ornaments but something like computers, mobile phones, cars and so on.
They like to portray women in housecleaning and child caring roles to sell cleaners, furniture or baby products as they do in this article. This gender stereotype is used to sell the products to the people they believe would use them most, showing them in the "situations" they would most likely be in. We have to admit that even in today’s society; women are still easy to be associated with housework by people so this type of stereotyping of women in news stories is commonplace.
3, Headline
The headline “Vaccing Gorgeous” is placed on the top of the photograph of Ruby with the largest typeface of this page. The headline’s position and size means that the reader’s attention should be split between the headline and the photograph. And the subheading below is “Ruby puts on glam for a dust-up”.
The headline “Vaccing Gorgeous” is a play on words. As we know “fucking gorgeous” is a phrase where fucking in this case used to emphasis the word “gorgeous”, at the same time, fucking is also a word that describes sex, so the whole point of the headline is easy to make people think of sex and makes her appear more of a sex object. Because she is using a vacuum cleaner in the photograph and “vaccing gorgeous” sounds like “fucking gorgeous”, they changed “fucking” to “vaccing”. The headline “vaccing gorgeous” implies the subject Ruby Wax is not only sexy, gorgeous looking, but also a hardworking housewife. The subheading “Ruby puts on glam for a dust-up” makes further explanation of “vaccing gorgeous”. No matter the photographs or the headline, we could hardly see any clue about Ruby Wax’s profession but a sexy housewife.
4, Contents
The content is placed on the right site of the photograph and it only takes up 1/5 of the place of the article, so it’s less attractive than the pictures. Connotations of the linguistic are central to the meaning of the news article to the reader. The journalists usually use different narrative codes to represent different news stories.
“What a true celebrity!” the journalist said at the beginning of the article. He defines the “true” celebrity as “dusting in a glam velvet frock and her trademark red lipstick.”
Just imagine how the newspaper usually describes the male celebrity, men are normally shown in occupational settings but not at home doing some housework.
From the second paragraph, it begins to tell us Ruby’s family background, her childhood and other experience. I will select some words and sentences in the article and list them below to analyze how this news story stereotypes Ruby Wax.
“Live in a posh London pad in trendy Notting Hill” “But glamour is nothing new to Ruby.” They express that Ruby is always a rich woman and lives a high live. There is only one word here to describe her profession—American comic. The following description doesn’t continue to introduce her status as a comic, but put the emphasis on how her parents want her to be a housewife. “……expecting her to marry a rich man and settle down.” “I would be one of those people you read about who go around shops with a machine gun.” There are two places mentions to “get her nails done”. The first one is in the forth paragraph “ My parents thought I would never add up to much, so they want me ……and have my nail done.” And later in the fifth paragraph, “Ruby, now a mother of three, did marry—and probably gets her nails done.” Maybe doing the nails is a typical behavior of women especially beautiful and fashionable women in stereotype, so in this article it is clearly emphasized.
There are 8 paragraphs at all but only the seventh wholly mentions Ruby Wax’s profession. We could know she “best known for Ruby Wax with…she’s interviewed everyone from Joan Collins to Fergie and Ben Stiller.” “But despite it all”, the final paragraph continues immediately , “we’re glad to see she’s still down to earth enough to do her own dusting-even if she does it in star style!” It repeats the comment in the first paragraph. What Ruby is engaged in and her excellence in occupation is not more important than being a gorgeous housewife.
Conclusion
There is still a large amount of stereotyping in today’s newspaper especially the tabloid newspaper. Portrayals of women, like the sample I choose, occur quite often all over the media. Today's cultural ideal of women is much independent and intelligent than centuries ago but women are still likely to be portrayed as sex object and housewife.
Number of words:
(Not including reference, abstract etc):1026
Reference
Michael Pickering.(2001)Stereotyping: The politics of representation. China. Palgrave
Media Awareness Network. Media Stereotyping. (15 Nov 2003)
Hartnett, Oonagh(1979) Sex-role stereotyping : collected papers.London .
Tavistock Publications
, (1999) “Gender role stereotyping in advertisements on two British radio stations”:
Helen Gambles. A Semiotic Analysis of a Newspaper Story (13 Nov 2003)
Paul Carter. A Semiotic Analysis of Newspaper Front-Page Photographs
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/pmc9601.html (11 Nov 2003)
