Looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, early analysis of gender and media is notable for the extraordinary _confidence_ of the analyses produced. Reviewing a decade of studies in the late 1970s, [Gaye Tuchman (1978b)](/media-studies/works_cited/tuchman-gaye-se/) unequivocally titled her article “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media” and wrote of how women were being destroyed by a combination of “absence,” “trivialization,” and “condemnation.” Such clear evaluations were not unique and were often accompanied by similarly robust calls to action—whether voiced as demands for more women in the industry, campaigns for “positive images,” or “guerrilla interventions” into billboard advertisements. Writing about this period of research on gender and the media, [Angela McRobbie (1999)](/media-studies/works_cited/mcrobbie-angela-se-2/) characterized it as one of “angry repudiation.” By the late 1980s, this angry certainty had largely given way to something more equivocal and complex. As [Myra Macdonald (1995)](/media-studies/works_cited/macdonald-myra/) noted, one reason was that media content changed dramatically. The notion that the media offered a relatively stable template of femininity to which to aspire gave way as media offered a more plural and fragmented set a of signifiers of gender. There was a new playfulness in media representations, a borrowing of codes between different genres,...