Gender

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) 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) characterized it as one of “angry repudiation.”