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Gender and the Media. Rosalind Gill. Cambridge: United Kingdom: Polity Press. 2007. 296 pages. $64.95
In the past few years social relations in terms of gender and its representation in the media have changed considerably. Alterations in gender relations, innovations in information technologies, transformations in the regulatory processes regarding copyrights and control and the everchanging process of globalization have initiated serious discussions in the academic arena about the portrayal of gender in the media. One project that gender scholars have undertaken is to reengage in a more detailed analysis of the construction of gender in today's media.
In Gender and the Media, Rosalind Gill approaches this task by addressing an inherent paradox concerning how gender is constructed in the current media: on one hand powerful images of women are presented that reflect the empowerment of women and, on the other, women are still viewed as mere objects of commoditization and oppression. She writes that, "everywhere, it seems, feminist ideas have become a kind of common sense, yet feminism has never been more bitterly repudiated (p. 1)." Gender and the Media is based on three primary theses: first, it analyzes the construction of gender in the modern Western media; second, it presents a detailed discussion of the sociological theories and conceptual ideas that can be used as guidelines to study gender representations in the media; and third, it discusses the political and cultural issues that can be used to challenge and alter the existing gender-based social relations in their media representations. In order to accomplish these objectives, Gill has organized the book in a very clear and precise way.
Besides the introduction, the book has been organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the first objective of the book and presents an interesting review of the key theoretical and political ideas in the sociological scholarship of feminist media that focuses on the construction of gender. Chapter 2 focuses on methodological issues and delineates the primary...