gURLs- Final Conclusion Blog

Cultural texts surround us in many different forms everyday. By critically analyzing what it is that we are seeing and being shown, one is able to recognize the subtle and more prominent ways in which gender is injected into the different types of media. Gender, in our Western culture, is mostly limited to male and female. This binary is and exclusive and inaccurate. It has been constructed, as many other things in our society have, as a hierarchy in which those things associated with being male and masculine are much more valued and respected, in comparison with things that are associated with feminine and female. However, both have to exist for the other one to contain meaning. Our blog outlines a broad range of examples that illustrate this point.

Websites act as a medium of culture by portraying the dominant cultural values of the time. As a result what we see is the perpetuation of the gender binary in websites such as gossip sites, cleaning product advertisements, sports sites and “reality” television. Also, what was prevalent while deconstructing these websites, was the presence of other forms of oppression and stereotypes. For example, many of the household cleaning product advertisements that we see portray an upper-middle class, white, heterosexual family. There is very little variation in the type of family that we most often see. This is a demonstration of the layers of oppression and exclusion that can exist in many types of situations.

Our research of gendered websites has proved that in terms of the ideological construction of what is feminine and masculine, things that are coded as feminine are frequently devalued. As we discussed in class, this is a learned response. We internalize social hierarchies and constructions through the process of socialization. All of this feeds into the hierarchy of high culture as valuable and often masculinized versus low culture, which is often feminized and less valuable. Our blog posts attempted to uncover ideas about the social constructions of femininity and masculinity in relation to high and low culture. A major discussion on the blogs stemmed from the website Perezhilton.com and whether or not it was gendered as feminine. Written by a homosexual male (self-proclaimed ‘Queen of all Media’), the site features your daily fix of celebrity gossip - “Celebrity Juice, Not from Concentrate” (Perezhilton.com). As we discussed in class in relation to soap operas, women’s gossip is something that is seen as socially illegitimate and thus is consequently devalued. Many students responded to the blog expressing that they did not want to admit their enjoyment of celebrity gossip due to embarrassment and that it was a ‘guilty pleasure’. This demonstrates how society views gossip. Partaking in it is often deemed a ‘waste of time‘ and this is connected to systems of domination. Gossiping in a way lacks credibility according to the dominant discourse (Hollows, 106).

As we have discussed in class, current dominant ideologies rely on hierarchical divisions between human beings. Our research of gendered websites and texts has revealed how dominant ideologies rely on a system of binary thinking, which results in the naturalization, and normalizing of certain roles for men and women. This type of dichotomous thinking does not necessarily reflect the actually lived realities of people, and could perhaps be referred to as a distortion of reality. Our research has shown that these ideas have become embedded in cultural texts including the world wide web, with sites such as www.mrclean.com and www.toysrus.ca depicting specific norms or roles for men and women. The section of Mr. Clean’s website that features advertisements from the company through history is particularly interesting. As Looie pointed out in one post, an ad from 1957 depicts a comic male placed into a ‘woman’s role’ with a frilly heart apron. Although there are certainly websites out there that are not gendered or that disrupt gender norms and categorizations, the web is not a space that is free from gendering. This was discussed in class in regards to hegemony and cultural texts, as cultural texts are spaces where a combination of representations can exist. We must consider how websites can spaces of both oppression and resistance (Roth, 2010).

Lastly we would like to discuss representations of masculinity and femininity through websites. Some excellent points were brought up in the blogs that contrasted “men’s” websites to “women’s” sites. www.spike.com, www.tsn.ca, and www.muscleandfitness.com were three sites that we determined were gendered masculine while websites such as www.cleanandclear.com, www.victoriassecret.com, and http://twimamas.wordpress.com were gendered feminine. Our research has led us to believe that the masculine websites often portray opposite ends of the spectrum from feminine ones, depicting extreme representations for how men ‘should be’. By analyzing the websites, we can determine the types of qualities that society values for men including strength, athleticism, and a lack of interest in the private space (as depicted on www.spike.com). Feminine websites such as www.victoriassecret.com portray the ‘ideal’ women through the Male Gaze and urge women to purchase lingerie and products to achieve this ideal. Other ‘feminine’ websites are devalued for their content such as gossip or their purpose such as fan sites of typical ‘chick’ texts. Websites may also be gendered as female because of the roles they represent, such as cleaning and home related websites. In conclusion, our research has helped us to better understand the constructions of femininity and masculinity in popular culture texts. Websites are contested spaces, which both resist and support dominant ideologies. Our goal was to highlight and deconstruct some of the most recognizably gendered websites and discuss the how this relates to the system of social hierarchies.

References:

Roth, J (2010). "Popular Culture and Counter Culture Lectures". January 5, 2010 to March 4, 2010. Lakehead University.

Aubrey B, Looie, Princess Consuela Banana Hammock