Course questions conventional wisdom on progress

By Ted Spiker

When a fashion photograph of an Asian woman flashes on the screen, the students lock in on her eyes. They’re distant, gazing off camera. One student questions the message that the pose sends about women. Then, comments ricochet around the room.

“She looks like an object.”

“She looks like she wants to be desired.”

“But is that a vacuous look? Does she look like she’s not in control?”

“Do you think it would make a difference if she was white?”

“They want her to look mean, because we want to see women mean. Happy isn’t sexy.”

“That’s why I liked it. She doesn’t look like what we expect.”

Today in the graduate course, race, class and gender in the media, students discuss gender roles in advertising. In the first 90 minutes, they make enough pop-culture references to fill an issue of Entertainment Weekly. To back their arguments, they cite Vogue, Quentin Tarantino, Big Bird, “Sex and the City,” “Friends,” ESPN, TiVo, Halle Berry, Eminem, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Trojan condoms, Queen Latifah, Clinique makeup, “The Apprentice,” Apple computers, and Tiffany (the jeweler, not the 1980s singer). But the intensity escalates when they see an ad featuring a white man with the same kind of gaze.

One student notes his arms are folded, while the woman’s arms rest by her side in a “see my breasts” pose. Another says the man looks powerful, while the woman looks like she should be overpowered. That’s when a male student takes the match to the propane.

“But here’s where I have a problem with all this,” he says. “The majority of people designing the ads are women.”

“So,” a female student says, “do you think women perpetuate it?”

“Yes,” he says.

“But where do you think they learned it?”

Then the class debates the issue of control: Who are the decision-makers – the ad designers, the corporate media leaders, or the clients? Who, ultimately, is responsible for the image?

The male student lobs one to his classmates: “Do you really think that Ted Turner is telling the designers, I want to see boobs?”

Several smash back in unison, “Yes!”

“O.K.,” he says, “maybe Ted Turner was a bad example.”

An open-mind policy

The point of race, class and gender in the media may not be who’s right or wrong about any particular image or issue, but rather who’s thinking about it.

Associate Prof. Michael Leslie introduced the course, which was recently approved at the undergraduate level, in 1997. It uses political economy, as well as critical and cultural studies, to examine images of men and women – specifically who creates and distributes these images and how they affect our perceptions and behaviors.

“I started it because I thought our students needed to be better equipped to function in an increasingly diverse environment, in which they were likely to encounter people very unlike themselves in perspective, experience and physical appearance,” Leslie says.

“They don’t understand discrimination, and by the way, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington both won Oscars, so what's the problem.”
—Prof. Michael Leslie

When Leslie begins this seminar-style, round-table course, he’s often greeted with a majority of students who are at least somewhat cynical. They’re the ones who say, “I don’t see any problems in the media. I don’t see any problem with the way people of color are represented in the media. There are a lot of black people on TV and in movies.”

The students cite “The Cosby Show.” They don’t understand discrimination, and by the way, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington both won Oscars, so what’s the problem?

Here’s where Leslie makes his point.

“What roles did Halle Berry and Denzel Washington play?” Leslie says. “What did they get their Oscars for? Halle Berry played a concubine for a white man, and Denzel Washington played a criminal. They got the highest cinematic honor we have because they represented the stereotypes very well.”

Using such arguments and the studies to support them, Leslie shows students all kinds of stereotypes the media perpetuate — such as black women as prostitutes, black men as crack users (while white men would be cocaine users), and white men as saviors for people of color (“Dances With Wolves”). Then they examine who controls the images and the media.

He also uses as an example a photo piece that appeared in a Gainesville publication. It depicted what people do at night. Of all the images, there was only one that showed a black person — and he was being arrested. The white people in the pictures were all engaged in social activity. When the editors were questioned, “they said that’s what we found, that it wasn’t intentional,” Leslie recalls.

But his point is they could have found black people having fun, or white people getting in trouble.

No matter the media’s motive, Leslie wants his class to know the impact those images can have on its audience.

“People have ways of looking at the world cultivated by school, education, families,” he says. “But if these schema are reinforced by the media, we have to hold the media responsible for the images they produce, and that’s why we have to call for concerted action to change them.”

Chatting about diversity

In this curriculum, concerted action has an added meaning — in that current students are the future media professionals who can make changes. Leslie doesn’t call for all non-whites and women to always be portrayed as lawyers, CEOs and other stereotypical images of success, but rather for diversity, where all kinds of people are represented in different ways.

Assistant Prof. Helena Särkiö, who specializes in gender and also teaches the course, introduced a new medium to the class: the Internet – where people do have control about the way they’re represented. When people first studied the Internet and chat rooms, they said, “It’s great when you use the computer where race and gender don’t exist – and people don’t have preconceived notions about each other.” But what’s really happening in chat rooms is that people assume that the person who’s communicating from another computer is a well-educated, white male between 25 and 40, Särkiö says.

“In the absence of other cues, when you’re communicating with someone online, you don’t see them, so you can’t tell whether they’re a woman or whether they’re black or white, people almost feel a need in other ways to communicate it with other people,” Särkiö says. “So, for example, a lot of times when girls and women go online, they use things like pink fonts and very flowery pictures and smiley faces. When boys write, they use the regular black-and-white fonts.

“With ethnicity, for example, people may use a signature that somehow signifies something about their ethnicity – like a quote from someone who represents their cultural background or Japanese symbols.”

The course is known for intense discussions – and for self-examination and self-criticism. Students often find the lessons hit hard.

In one of Leslie’s classes, the students discussed the characteristics of beauty. They said black women are stereotypically considered beautiful when they have traditionally white characteristics – straightened hair, lighter skin. “What does that do to the self-esteem of the average black woman?” Leslie says. “That you’re something that needs to be transformed.”

At one point during class, a female African-American student began crying. She said, “This is so hard for me.”

She told the class how she straightens her hair to go out – and thus avoids exercise or swimming in the morning because sweat and pool water would kink it.

The opportunity to understand the media’s effect on individuals is one reason why journalism graduate student Adam Spangler thinks the class should be required for undergraduate and graduate students in the College.

“Stereotypes still run rampant and control the airwaves of every medium or outlet,” he says. “The class, from my experience, leveled the playing field.”