Suggested panel: Media, Democracy and Politics in a Perspective of Intersectionality.
The media both produce and reproduce ideas of living and citizenship. They can contribute to stereotyping and discrimination as well as challenge the dominant power structures in society. As the media society develops with more publication platforms, the visual culture has become more important.
This paper explores how national media contributes to exclusion /inclusion and feeling belonging in a transnational world. The focus is on how gender and other grounds for discrimination intersects and creates power structures of visibility, in all genres and on a meta level. A basis for the study is that all types of media matters and stereotypes can have a function as a power instrument which is manifest in all genres.
The empirical study investigates the dominant images of women and men in Swedish mainstream media by analysing content (including fact, fiction and advertising in broadcast, print) from 1994, 2004 and 2014. It contains two levels. The first level is quantitative and examines representation in the largest media outlets in all genres (a total of 34 products) in Sweden during one day. Added to that is the most popular movie, rented film and advertising and public advertising. (Included variables are social class, age, sexuality, functionality, ethnic background, religious background, minority/majority, etc.)
The second level extracts patterns from the representation study and use a qualitative analysis to pinpoint what can be considered gender traits in the media. Hence, we identify stereotypes and visibility structures that we then relate to political discourses/policies concerning diversity and discrimination. Another dimension is to relate media representation to population statistics.
The first report in this project was published in 1994 by University of Gothenburg: Massmediernas enfaldiga typer: Kvinnor och män i mediebruset. The material for 2014 is a work in progress.
