Re-Creational Television: The Paradox of Change and Continuity within Stereotypical Iconography |
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| Authors: | Shawna V Hudson |
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| Institution: | Is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Rutgers University and a 1997–98 fellow of the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. Her primary research interests include the study of culture, mass media, sexuality, and gender. Her dissertation, Watching Sex on TV: Reinterpreting Content Using a Sociological Gaze;, examines the content and context of sexual imagery on U.S. network television. Employing content and qualitative analyses of videotaped data for each network channel, she explores images of sexual behavior and discussions of sexual mores and sexual interaction to determine the messages most often accepted, promoted, rejected, and/or rendered invisible on television. |
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| Abstract: | Speculation abounds regarding the cumulative effect of stereotypical images in the media, especially those effects directed toward ethnic/gender identity. Using images of Black women in the United States as a case study, this paper explores the ways in which three historical stereotypes—Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire—are re-created in current-day television broadcasts. I argue that these recreations influence modern depictions of Black women in important ways. But my analysis differs from other sociological works on stereotypes, as it critically examines three underexplored components of the stereotyping process: (1) the symbolic properties of stereotypical images; (2) the separation of time and space achieved on television; and (3) the use of rigid interpretive frames as means of sustaining stereotypes in this media age.
b]lack women, still least powerful economically, socially and politically in American society … have been refracted through a prism that tends to project them in one of three extremes: larger than life as matriarchs or sex objects, diminished to insignificance as mammies or maids, or faded into invisibility as irrelevant. (Edwards 1993, p. 217) |
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