    You have by now introduced your magazine, described its genre and said which institution owns it, you will have indicated its target audience, its competitors and may even have said something briefly about the magazine’s “ mission statement. ”

You are now going to examine the types of representations you have found within its pages both in terms of pictures and articles, this will be in part an exercise in content analysis as well as analysis of more specific pictures and articles.
You will be looking for themes, recurring ideas, stereotypes and any material which attempts to construct templates, roles or attitudes for its target audience: you will be looking for assumptions and adverts which clearly construct a certain type of audience .
You will be looking for who is absent in terms of age, race, body shape and social type.


You will be asking the questions as to whether the representations are negative in any way and noticing if there is a clear policy of exclusion of certain types of people and whether these exclusions are justified.


In representational terms you will be looking at whether or not the adverts conflict with or support the rest of the magazine.

These are some questions you could ask and answer:


* How does the magazine construct body size and shape?

*Are the people in the magazine models or “ordinary people”?

* What advice does the magazine seem to be giving about roles , behaviour, careers, relationships and lifestyles ?

* How are people constructed inside the magazine’s photography and general imagery ie body language , dresscodes, backgrounds etc ?

Your next mini-essay should attempt to answer the following question:

How does your magazine represent the “world” of its target audience, their ideals their aspirations, their fantasies, their “realities” and their lifestyle generally ?

At its most basic, the term 'representation' refers to the way images and language actively construct meanings according to sets of conventions shared by and familiar to makers and audiences.

Conventions form part of our cultural knowledge - we know 'what to do' with the media products we come across even if we don't do it - and the conventions used are as familiar to the participants of a particular culture as the meanings they make.
Assumptions, 'common knowledge', common sense, knowledge, widespread beliefs and popular attitudes are all part of the context of meanings within which representations are produced and circulate.

They also form the basis of our own cultural knowledge, varied though it may be. This context and our individual ranges of knowledge, values and attitudes is governed in turn by a system of power that offers varied legitimacy to these meanings, ideas and responses.
In this system, there is an hierarchy in which some meanings come to be dominant and others marginalized.

Approaches to representation incorporate the way the media use conventions, how audiences make meanings from them and how representations work and are used within a cultural context.
There can be no absolute version of 'how things are' but only many competing versions, some of which are more highly regarded than others in society and hence are circulated more widely.

In looking at the media as 'representation' we may examine the versions that have currency, the elements that are repeated across them and the relation to common-sense definitions we acquire as participants within a culture.

We study narrative, visual structures, character or whatever, to get at something else - the way in which meanings are offered to us and our part making sense of them for ourselves.

UNDERSTANDING REPRESENTATION

The different questions one might ask of representation have been usefully set out by Richard Dyer in "TV and Schooling" Put simply:

1    What sense do representations make of the world? What are they representing to us and how? Semiotics, codes, conventions, discourses, language itself, both semantic and iconic, ideology, messages overt and covert, propaganda, bias, agendas, newsworthiness, censorship.

2    What are typical representations of groups in society? Gender, race, age, religion Stereotypes? Statistically correct?

3    Who is speaking, for whom? White middle-aged men with degrees, The role of Institutions? Individuals? Democracy?

4    What does this example represent to me. What does it mean to others who see it? Audience reception theory? Aberrant decoding?

A brief extract from Janice Winship's excellent book. It is available from the Grove Library

They are ridiculed, scolded or humiliatingly ignored. Thus the 'woman's world' which women's magazines represent is created precisely because it does not exist outside their pages. In their isolation on the margins of the men's world, in their uneasiness about their feminine accomplishments, women need support - desperately. As Jane Reed, long-time editor of Woman's Own and then editor in chief of Woman, put it, 'a magazine is like a club.
Its first function is to provide readers with a comfortable sense of community and pride in their, identity (Hughes-Hallett 1982, p. 21).

Yet such is the power of masculine wisdom that women's magazines and their millions of readers are perenially belittled by many women no less than by most men. As TV soap opera is to news and current affairs, so women's magazines are the soaps of journalism, sadly maligned and grossly misunderstood.

Over the years critics have disparagingly opined that women's magazines are: 'a journalism for squaws ... you find yourself in a cosy twilit world' (1965); it is a world of 'the happy ever after trail' (1976); 'cooking and sewing - the woman's world' (1977); 'kitchen think' (1982). They lament that women's magazines do not present a true and real picture of women's lives: 'Why ... does the image deny the world?' (1965). Worse, magazines are 'completely schizophrenic' (1958); 'experience and make-believe merge in a manner conducive to the reader's utter bewilderment'

But if the focus of women's magazines is predominantly home and hearth, if the world they present is a happy-ever-after one, if they do refuse the reality of most women's lives, if they do offer a schizophrenic mix - and none of these characteristics is quite accurate - then there are pertinent cultural reasons why this is so. I want in this book to delve beneath this simple and dismissive description in order both to explain the appeal of the magazine's generic formula and to critically consider its limitations and potential for change. to turn over the page.

If the profile of women's magazines is partly determined by the state of play between women and men, it is also (as indeed is the 'game' between women and men) shaped by a consumer culture geared to selling and making a profit from commodities, and whose sales are boosted (it's firmly believed) through the medium of advertising. As commodities, women's magazines sell their weekly or monthly wares not only by advertising proper but also by the 'advertisement' of their own covers.

On any magazine stand each women's magazine attempts to differentiate itself from others also vying for attention. Each does so by a variety of means: the title and its print type, size and texture of paper, design and lay-out of image and sell-lines (the term the magazine trade aptly uses for the cover captions), and the style of model image - but without paying much attention to how a regular reader will quickly be able to pick out her favourite from others nestling competitively by it. Cover images and sell lines, however, also reveal a wealth of knowledge about the cultural place of women's magazines.

The woman's face, which is their hallmark, is usually white, usually young, usually smoothly attractive and immaculately groomed, and usually smiling or seductive. The various magazines inflect the image to convey their respective styles - domestic or girl-about-town, cheeky or staid,"upmarket" or "downmarket" ~ by subtle changes of hairstyle, neckline and facial pose. They waver from it occasionally rather than regularly with royals and male celebrities, mothers-and-babies and couples. Only magazines on the fringes of women's magazines, like Ideal Home (concentratedly home-oriented and with a high male readership) never use the female model. It is no profundity to say that as the sign of 'woman' this cover image affirms and sells those qualities of white skin, youth, beauty, charm and sexuality as valuable attributes of femininity. In marked contrast Spare Rib covers break sharply with the stereotyped plasticity of the model face, and communicate immediately how far that magazine distances itself from such an evaluation of femininity.

There is one other important and defining characteristic of this cover image: the woman's gaze. It intimately holds the attention of 'you', the reader and viewer. Such an image and gaze also has a wide currency in ads directed at women and men, has a daily venue on page 3 of the Sun and Star, and appears on the cover of 'girlie' magazines like Mayfair Loaded and Fiesta. The woman's image in these latter is obviously caught up in a provocatively sexual significance. Her partially revealed body speaks the sexuality about which the facial expression often equivocates. Her gaze holds that of the male voyeur; but it is he who has the controlling look: to look or not to bother, to choose to be sexually aroused or not.

She is the object and toy for his sexual play. It would be pushing it to suggest that the covers of women's magazines work in quite this way. For one thing many completely play down the 'come-on' look, for another the covers are primarily addressed to women. Nevertheless, what I would argue is that the gaze between cover model and women readers marks the complicity between women that we see ourselves in the image which a masculine culture has defined.

It indicates symbolically, too, the extent to which we relate to-each other as women through absent men: it is 'the man' who, in a manner of speaking, occupies the space between model image and woman reader.
In fact few women readers will make an immediate identification with these cover images: they are too polished and perfect, so unlike us. Paradoxically, though, we do respond to them. Selling us an image to aspire to, they persuade us that we, like the model, can succeed. For the image is a carefully constructed one, albeit that it sometimes apes a 'natural look'. The model is only the cipher, the (often) anonymous face for others' skills and a range of commodities to fill. As Company puts it: 'Cover photograph of Joanne Russell by Tony McGee. Vest dress' by Sheridan Barnett; necklace by Pellini. Hair by Harry Cole at Trevor Sorbie. Makeup by Philippe at Sessions' (April 1983).

Easy then, 'you' too can create the look - given the ready cash. Company continues, 'Our cover girl look can be achieved by using Charles of the Ritz signature Collection for spring: complexion, Amboise Ritz Mat Hydro-Protective Make-up; cheeks, Cinnamon Glow Revenescence Cheekglow; eyes, Country Plums Perfect Finish Powder, Eyecolour Trio, Black Ritz Eye Pencil, Black Perfect Lash

Stereotypes

What are stereotypes?

“Stereotypes are not actual people, but widely circulated ideas or assumptions about particular groups. They are often assumed to be 'lies', and to need to be 'done away with' so we can all 'get rid of our prejudices' and meet as equals. The term tends to be much more derogatory than 'type' (which means very similar things.)…………….

Stereotyping is a process of categorisation necessary to make sense of the world, and the flood of information and impressions we receive minute by minute. We are all prejudiced, in its root sense of 'pre-judging' in order to carve our way through any situation………
We all employ typifications in certain situations. We all belong to groups that can be typified, and stereotyped.” (The Media Student's Book G. Branston & R. Stafford 1996)

“Stereotypes act as a shorthand for delineating character. Though they may involve some truth about the social realities of people's lives (Dyer 1993), they are limiting because:
    *    they suggest that particular characteristics are shared by many people
    *    they suggest that these characteristics are part of the nature of these people (that is, they are genetic/biological) rather than connected to any social realities
    *    in many instances stereotypes are used perjoratively by dominant groups to describe subordinate groups.” (Media and Society M.O'Shaughnessy 1999)

Branston and Stafford reiterate the second bullet point, putting it this way:
Another key point about stereotypes is that they can take something that is an effect of a group's situation and encourage audiences to feel it is the cause of that group's low status.
The example they give is of the Hollywood stereotypes of black slaves before the civil war. Two features of the stereotypes were: a shuffling walk and musical rhythm, and a tendency to burst into song and dance readily.

“To say that these demeaning stereotypes embody a grain of truth may seem in itself insulting, but consider the following facts: Slaves on the Southern plantations on the 19thc would have their calf muscles cut if they tried to run away (the shuffling gait of the stereotype) and Slaves were given hardly any education or cultural opportunities (Hostile use of the stereotype demeans efforts to make music and dance out of very simple resources to hand.)

Most criticism of stereotypes make the following assumptions:

·    That the Media has a responsibility to be 'realistic' and represent groups of people as they actually are (as if 'reality' actually can be agreed upon.) Where as audiences may seek escape etc.

·    That only irrational or ignorant prejudice could possibly account for stereotypes. Where as creative use of stereotypes can become a celebration of a particular group that members of that group seek to identify with (eg. Instead of Ali G encouraging us to simply laugh at gangster rapper wannabes from non-black middle class British backgrounds he also celebrates and thereby encourages the social phenomena.)

·    That the media has huge powers to socialise people into beliefs (a hypodermic model of audiences) when perhaps audiences are capable as Tessa Perkins suggests of holding a stereotype without believing it or acting upon it.

·    That audiences immediately relate the stereotype signifier to the referent. Where in fact they may be reading the stereotype in relation to other signifiers within a well understood genre. (So that when we see Harry Enfield's camp 'suit you' sales assistants we do not take this signifier and relate it to all gentlemen's outfitters, rather we read it within its media framework, looking at how Johnny Depp reacts to it when he has a walk on part and perhaps see it as a logical extension of John Inman's 'Are you Being Served' character. Certainly they demonstrate the freedom that the media gives to camp characters to talk crudely about women and sex. (A freedom that politically correct heterosexual men don't enjoy.)

A Joke?

“I knew it was the mother-in-law 'cause when they heard her coming the mice started throwing themselves on traps. Les Dawson

What factors do you have to consider in deciding whether this joke is 'just a joke' or whether it is also potentially socially damaging?

Tessa Perkins

Nine Qualifications to what seems like common sense about stereotypes:
With italics from Mrs S

Positive Stereotypes are not always negative. The Irish tourist board propagates a positive stereotype of Ireland. A land of friendly drinking, music, greenery and 'the crack'. This stereotype also helps to sell Guinness on St Patrick's day.

Own You can hold a stereotype of your own social group they don't have to be about other people. Ie We could all use t' ee by gum Yorkshire stereotype and we may even recognise people we know in parts of it - we may even identify with it and find identity/community in it. Certainly when I'm in the company of Southerners I flatten mi vowels like mi cap!

Oppressed Stereotypes are not necessarily all about oppressed social groups. We can have stereotypes of High Court Judges. (Though they are in positions of power and could complain if they took offence.)

Hold Audiences and Media producers can hold a stereotype without necessarily believing it (or all of it) We all recognise the 'Hallo Hallo' style Frenchman but we don't believe it. Perhaps we are more likely to believe stereotypes when we can't readily 'reality check' them i.e. if you've never been to France and never seen a French film or met a Frenchman maybe you're more likely to believe the stereotype.

False Not all parts of all stereotypes are false. Cowboys do wear hats - although the idea that they ride horses may now be out of date, they perhaps use quads to get around? (Perhaps the true parts make you susceptible to believing the false parts?)

Complex and Simple Stereotypes are not all simple. The example Perkins gives is of the 'dumb blonde' she is childlike and knowing, innocent and manipulative.

Behaviour Holding a stereotype and even believing all or part of it does not necessarily make you act in ways that oppress other social groups. In an extreme example, an audience might hold racist Asian stereotypes to be true but they are not necessarily going to vote NF or abuse actual Asian people.

Unchanging While it is true that stereotypes often lag behind the times that produced them, it is not true that they are unchanging. They do adapt and develop as society changes and/or audiences get bored.

Minorities Just as not all stereotypes are at the expense of oppressed social groups neither are they all at the expense of minorities. We have stereotypes of men for example.