CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Shields, V. R. (2003, May). Media education, media activism, and self-acceptance as strategies for change: Can Sense-Making help us understand communicating processes involved in early media literacy interventions? Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Diego, CA.
© Vickie Rutledge Shields (2003).

OVERVIEW:
How can girls’ relationships to the idealized image in advertising and across the media change? Sometimes the situation seems hopeless. Every time women make significant social strides, such as breaking the glass ceiling of middle management, advertising sells our achievement back to us, de-politicized and over-feminized. However, 30 years of feminist critique of ads and more recent reception analyses of audiences of ads reveal there are many lessons to be gleaned about how interventions into girls negative relationship to ads might be achieved. Shields (2002), in a reception analysis of 73 men and women reported that for some women the images of women in ads had not affected them all that much in their youth. [1] They attributed this to the messages their families consistently gave them about being three-dimensional beings and that appearance was only one small part of what they were as human beings.

Questions:

• What if this powerful socialization process was not left solely up to the family?
• Could early daycare providers, church schoolteachers, and elementary teachers be educated in how the often subtle messages given differently to girls and boys about their bodies can serve to fuel the fire always and already lit by the media?

We need to identify the most influential social structures of a child’s early life, and try to become cognizant of what messages children are receiving about their gendered bodies. If too much emphasis is being placed on appearance for the girls, the situation needs to be changed.

This project asks whether a feminist media studies approach to media literacy coupled with a Sense-Making approach for uncovering the communicating processes in early media intervention will shed light on further interventions around body image and body self-esteem in elementary school girls and boys. The goal would be to develop an elementary school curriculum to be delivered to 4th graders and repeated for retention in 5th grade. The approach to the curriculum takes audience pleasures of media seriously as well as audience sense-making of particular viewing experiences. In this approach the unifying concern would be around representations of gender and sexual stereotypes, “with the purpose of ‘denaturalizing’ the media.” One of the major goals of such a curriculum would be deconstructing how the media impart particular cultural values, such as unrealistic body expectations, healthy eating, and accurate information about growth, puberty and metabolism.

I wish to offer a meta-analysis of what I see as a shift in our efforts as cultural studies scholars and activists concerned with the relationship between women and girls and media representation, to an ever younger audience. It is a shift of emphasis from a paradigm of “intervention” in the form of the deconstruction of images, the reception analyses of audience members and conscious-ness raising, (particularly in women’s studies and media studies college classrooms)—to a paradigm of “prevention,” inoculation, and resilience, primarily in the form of alternative girls’ magazines, video, curriculum guides and anti-marketing ad campaigns.

INTERVENTION PARADIGM:
UNDO DAMAGE ALREADY DONE:

• Deconstruction/consciousness-raising
• Reception analysis
• Support groups
• Media literacy-in classroom and video
• Workshops and lectures

PREVENTION PARADIGM:
PREVENT DAMAGE BEFORE IT HAPPENS:
Methods and Innovations:

• Anti-marketing ads
• Web sites
• School assemblies
• Alternative magazines
• Curriculum guides
• Guest speakers

SENSE-MAKING AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION PARADIGMS:
Questions Through the Lens of Feminist Media Studies and Reception Analysis:

• Where does the “meaning” of ads reside—in the text, in the audience, or in a complex web of signification that links the two?
• What are the structural constraints imposed on girls by the dominant messages about gender in advertising?
• How do those messages articulate with messages about gender in society at large, and when and how do girls have the interpretive freedom to negotiate with the dominant messages in advertising and in society at large?

Questions Through the Lens of Sense-Making:

• How can one operationalize research that captures a portrait of when and how viewers decode through “structures of dominance” and when and how viewers resist and negotiate with those structures of dominance?
• When and how do social structures constrain, restrict, enable, or liberate agency?
• When and how do individual situational and trans-situational (e.g., demographic) uniqueness sometimes play as big a part in decoding strategies as structural dominance?

This line of research will shed light on the discursive bridges girls build between the macro structures of power and control of a mass mediated cultural forms such as advertising, and the micro-politics of everyday living as gendered subjects of these macro structures. Sense-Making as a methodology can make such illumination possible.

Conceiving of research methods that begin to address these questions suggest ways of tracking certain kinds of movement and process. Further, asking questions that assume a dialectical relationship between structures competing for dominance at any given moment of articulation, and the interpretive freedom of audiences assumes certain characteristics about the nature of human beings and more specifically, about the nature of human communicating.

EXAMPLE:
Intervening at School: Media literacy courses are very appropriate for the elementary school level and beyond, however the reality is, most students don’t experience any kind of media literacy training until college and most college campuses do not require such courses in the general education requirements. Sut Jhally & Justin Lewis (1998) propose a cultural studies approach when explaining that “media literacy should be about helping people to become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers.” They advocate media literacy programs that do much more than teach students to analyze media messages. “To appreciate the significance of contemporary media, we need to know why they are produced, under what constraints and conditions and by whom” (111).

A feminist media studies approach to media literacy shares the concerns of a cultural studies approach especially as explained by Robert Kubey (1998). This approach takes audience pleasures of media seriously as well as audience sense-making of particular viewing experiences. In this approach, the unifying concern would be around representations of gender and sexual stereotypes, “with the purpose of ‘denaturalizing’ the media” (64). One of the major goals of such a curriculum would be deconstructing how the media impart particular cultural values, such as women’s subordination to men.

AFTERTHOUGHTS:
In a way we have come full circle to the mission of 70s feminist consciousness-raising. The major difference being that 30 years of feminist, film and media studies scholarship has delivered both a more sophisticated portrait of the relationship between gender, generation, media effects and culture than was available then.

The cumulative results show us that although images of gender are changing and diversifying, they are not doing so at anywhere close to the pace at which generation after generation of girls are hitting puberty and hitting a brick wall in self-esteem and direction.

This scholarship on gender has provided compelling evidence that: culture gifts upon boys the ability resist the pull of images and does everything possible to pull girls into them.

The visual landscape of advertising, TV and film need to change and media researchers, teachers, videographers and media watchdogs all need to keep deconstructing and policing the terrain, however, if girls have the tools and desire to resist negative images, the power of those images over the girls diminishes even if the features remain the same.

Questions:

• How much of the wonderful inoculation of activism will penetrate mainstream mass media and mainstream school curriculum?
• Can it come in time for the next generation of girls?

FOOTNOTES:

1. Shields, V. R. (with Heinecken, D.). (2002). Measuring up: How advertising affects self-image. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistshieldsv.html