Examine the intersection of psychology and the media

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Examine the intersection of psychology and the media, by exploring the way difference signifies as Otherness in media portrayals of race.

Over the course of my essay I will aim to explore the way difference signifies as Otherness in media portrayals of race by focussing on three main concepts while also trying to define the term Otherness. The three main ideas I have chosen to focus on are that of fetishism, fear of the Other and the commodification of Otherness. I have decided to look at these examples as I see fetishism and the fear of the Other as being overt in their signification of difference as the Other as I will explain further on. I also see the two working concurrently, in that the fetish image manifests itself into an image of fear and phobia through the preconceived idea of the Other as animal or savage. The final part of my analysis will be based upon the commodification of Otherness. I believe this is a very relevant topic as companies are increasingly using the Other to sell their products, exploiting the Other. I am going to provide examples of this exploitation and explore how difference is presented as Otherness in selling products, and ever more frequently the possibility of a new way of life.

There are a number of writers I will refer to but I will base my work on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Kobena Mercer and Cornel West.

To fully understand this question one must first try to define or at least recognise what is meant by difference and Otherness. I perceive difference in the west as being non-white or non colonialist, those that were colonised, African’s, Native American’s, Indian, Chinese, the list goes on. It is simply being different. Otherness, however, takes on a different connotation than difference which suggests there is room for another civilised culture. Whereas Otherness brings to mind something darker, menacing, something of the unknown which could be a threat to the established way. Homi Bhabha wrote, “ Otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement.” thus suggesting a collective of alienation, a rejection by euro centrism. Surely though, for instance, in African culture the native people cannot be the Other? So this idea of Otherness has to be a constructed ideal as Bhabha further said of Otherness, “ “Never the affirmation of a pre-given identity….. - it is always the production of an ‘image’ of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image.” This point shows how the media and other agents of representation can create this idea of difference as Otherness.  It is essentially a white-supremacist, Eurocentric view which affirms the status of the non-European as inferior.

I have based my exploration of fetishism on an essay by Kobena Mercer titled, Reading Racial Fetishism: The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe taken from Mercer‘s Welcome To The Jungle. The black male body is the subject of this fetish and is something which has been portrayed as Otherness through the media. Mercer looks at how the photographer has positioned the black male body as a spectacle, it has been objectified. He identifies in the picture “Man in a Polyester suit” (which shows a black male’s penis  hanging out of the trousers of his polyester suit) that the black man as subject has been reduced to an image of sexuality and nothing else. The framing of the image places the penis centrally in the photo, thus suggesting that the most important aspect of the black male existence is his large penis. By contrasting the use of the suit which represents a western, European ideal of culture and that of a black penis emerging from the zipper is almost confirming the view of the Other as a thing of nature which cannot be contained by European “normality”, it cannot be civilised. This may not have been the idea of the photograph, in fact it could be said that it is an empowering image but as Mercer writes;

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“ Sex is confirmed as the nature of black male identity, as the polyester suit confirms the black man’s failure to gain access to culture. Even when the Other aims for bourgeois respectability (the signified of the suit), his camouflage fails to conceal the fact that he originates essentially, like his dick, from somewhere anterior to civilization.”

There is the existing racial stereotype that all black men have a large penis which is played upon within the press as something wild and exotic such as pictures of the athlete Linford Christie with captions referring to his genitals rather than his ...

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