Gender Represenation in Gossip Girl

Authors Avatar

The media cannot present the world to us, despite their assertions of truth, reality and verisimilitude. In practice the media offer us perspectives or selected views on our world. They re-present that world to us by constructing images and behaviours for lots of different groups within, and indeed outside, our own society. So we are aware of families represented in a range of television soaps. We have knowledge of sportspeople through sports coverage in the press and on television programmes. We are dependent on the media for our insights into what it was like to live in a time before we were born. Our knowledge of other countries and lifestyles is usually based on media constructs. And so on.

The context and the characters appearance in soap operas is important in defining representation for example women with blonde hair would be expected to be physically very attractive but dim and naïve. This is a stereotype used throughout soaps and life. Although stereotypes make characters easier to relate to they do take away some of the realism because they tend to be over exaggerated. Stereotypes are frequently used as a way of creating easily identifiable characters. They do not tend to create a bad representation of people. For example Peggy in Eastenders is a stereotypical busty, blond and a loud landlady but she is not seen in a bad light in fact the opposite as she is seen as a strong woman able to cope with anything life throws at her.

Join now!

The fact is that the media have the power through selection and reinforcement to give us very influential portrayals of a whole range of groups, situations and ideas. We make sense of these representations in different ways according to the values and assumptions we carry around in our own heads. So representation is not just about the way the world is presented to us but also about how we engage with media texts in order to interpret and assimilate such portrayals. This concept of representation is, therefore, just as much about audience interpretation as it is about the portrayals ...

This is a preview of the whole essay