This essay examines the contribution of textual analysis to media and journalism research. Based on my experience with text-based journalism studies, I highlight the unique methodological position of media content between producers’ intentions and audience interpretations. My central argument is that media texts present a distinctive discursive moment between encoding and decoding that asks for special scholarly engagement. The narrative character of media content, its potential as a site of ideological negotiation and its impact as mediated reality necessitates interpretation in its own right. By engaging current criticisms of the methodology (especially by Greg Philo) I hope to reposition textual analysis (as text-only analysis) as an important option for journalism scholars.

In defense of textual analysis

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the model offered by Thomas Rochon is used to examine how ideas, activism, and changing American values have influenced advertiser practices as they relate to sexualized images of men in mainstream media. Previous research has highlighted the importance of economic shifts on advertiser practices, ignoring the importance of cultural factors, such as the influence of the gay liberation movement on representations of masculinity in the post 1960s era. Second, a quantitative analysis of sexualized depictions of masculinity is presented. These data suggest that men in contemporary advertisements increasingly display the visual cues of objectification. After positioning these sexualized images in a larger social, political, and economic context, the implications of male objectification is discussed.

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Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification

–The discourses constructing the coming-out of Ellen DeGeneres/Ellen Morgan, star of and lead character in the ABC television sitcom Ellen, were permeated with implications of authenticity and liberation, illustrating the continuing power of the confessional ritual described by Michele Foucault in The History of Sexuality. In contrast to the popular interpretation of the coming-out as an escape from repression, media treatment of the Ellen phenomenon was productive, in Foucault's sense, constructing a regulatory discourse that constrained the implications of gay visibility on commercial television by channeling it through a narrative of psychological autonomy, through television norms for representing homosexuality, and through an overarching strategy of personalization. I conclude with a discussion of the problems of “poster-child politics” as exemplified by the Ellen discourse.

Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility

Sex and the City became central to debates about postfeminist culture following its global impact at the centre of a culture of female fandom. Its success and influence is symptomatic of the cultural and economic forces shaping television in the digital era, and offers a case study of how the deregulation, commercialisation and proliferation of television into multiple channels have enabled a new form of sexualised address in which women’s sexual desire is central. But this is expressed through an ironic aesthetic which offers a ‘complicit critique’ of the women’s lifestyle and their commodified relation to their bodies and identity.

Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama

This essay examines the connections between the Miss America pageant and reality makeover television shows. We argue that televised performances of gender have shifted focus from the intensely scripted, out-of-touch Miss America to reality makeover shows that normalize cosmetic surgery as a means to become the ‘ideal’ woman. While both spectacles offer their viewers performances of femininity, these performances need to be understood as emerging from the cultural and political conditions in which they are produced. This difference in presentation of the subjects of beauty pageants and makeover programmes speaks respectively to the changing role of media in the normalization of performances of femininity, as well as to the affiliation of many young women with post-feminist politics in the United States.

Carolyn Kitch

Papers

Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement since 1970