Leticia Anderson - Minority Women and Western Media: Challenging Representations and Articulating New Voices

Minority Women and
Western Media

Media, Culture, and the Arts

Series Editors: Theresa Carilli and Jane Campbell, both Purdue University Northwest

Media, Culture, and the Arts explores the ways cultural expression takes shape through the media or arts. The series initiates a dialogue about media and artistic representations and how such representations identify the status of a particular culture or community. Supporting the principles of feminism and humanitarianism, the series contributes to a dialogue about media, culture, and the arts.

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Minority Women and the Media: Challenging Representations and Articulating New Voices, edited by Maha Bashri and Sameera Ahmed

Italian Americans on Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future, edited by Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan Gravano

Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives, edited by Bruce E. Drushel and Brian M. Peters

Locating Queerness in the Media: A New Look, edited by Jane Campbell and Theresa Carilli

Gender, Race, and Social Identity in American Politics: The Past and Future of Political Access, edited by Lori L. Montalbano

Minority Women and
Western Media

Challenging Representations
and Articulating New Voices

Edited by
Maha Bashri and Sameera Ahmed

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books

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All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bashri, Maha, editor. | Ahmed, Sameera, (Associate professor), editor.

Title: Minority women and western media : challenging representations and articulating new voices / edited by Maha Bashri and Sameera Ahmed.

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2020. | Series: Media, culture, and the arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Minority Women and Western Media presents global research examining representations of minority women in different media contexts and shows that discrimination is about gender as well as other intersecting characteristics. Authors illustrate how stereotypes are challenged and new discourses emerge around the world giving voice to minority womenProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020007634 (print) | LCCN 2020007635 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498599856 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498599863 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Minority women in mass media. | Discrimination in mass media. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in mass media. | Minority womenPress coverage.

Classification: LCC P94.5.M555 .M56 2020 (print) | LCC P94.5.M555 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007634

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007635

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Theresa Carilli

Maha Bashri

Khulekani Madlela

Beris Artan zoran and Ilgar Seyidov

Leticia Anderson and Kathomi Gatwiri

Zahra Jafari

Sigal Barak-Brandes and Debora Freud

Sameera Tahira Ahmed

Maha Bashri and Sameera Ahmed

Figures

Tables

Toward a New Freedom

For over twenty years, I have actively studied media depictions of women. From my years of scrutiny and study, I have become alarmingly aware of two underlying themes. First, women are outsiders. They are not part of the mainstream. Their viewpoints and ideas and their expressions of protest and empowerment are considered radical and dismissed as such. Second, upholding the status quo where white men are heroes and saviors continues to be the focus of media representations. Maha Bashri and Sameera Tahira Ahmeds brilliant anthology, Minority Women and Western Media: Challenging Representations and Articulating New Voices , advances a fresh insight into these themes, arguing that globally women of color/minority women are fighting an additional battle in the media. Their battle, as recognized by the editors and authors, examines depictions of women of color/minority women as alien and needing to be tamed while disabled women are described as needy, passive, and dependent. This book raises questions about the wealth of negative media images of women and specifically global images of these women, and the dearth of images that demonstrate their resilience and strength.

The 2017 Womens March, which attempted to unify women globally by acknowledging the challenges women face, brought women to a new horizon with the hope that protest would be the ticket to change. While it has increased awareness, we know that a global womens movement is in its infancy. Through feminist analyses and theories about the way women are being treated and represented, Minority Women and Western Media provides us with knowledge to disrupt the master narrative by questioning how and why such skewed or negative images are still so pervasive. In Anderson and Gatwiris article , On Getting Yassmined: how the Australian Media Polices the Bodies of Women of Color, the authors state, Media is one of the most powerful contemporary tools for creating discourse and influencing public consciousness. Skewed representations of minoritized women in the media impacts upon self-image for minoritized people, as well as promoting negative perceptions of them to wider audiences. Whether studying media representations of Muslim women in the New York Times or media representations of refugees in Turkish newspapers, the authors demonstrate how stereotypes persist and are shaped by public perception. According to Bashri, in her article Inclusion, Exclusion, and Belonging: Media Representations of American Muslim Women, The Case of the New York Times 20072017, media depictions of Muslim women are both othered and gendered in media coverage, often dismissing and ignoring the variety of backgrounds and life experiences these women represent. Artan zoran and Seyidov in their article about how Turkish newspapers represent women who are refugees remind us that Media tends to reconstruct reality rather than reflect it and in doing so, the selection process is implemented to reconstruct some meanings by excluding others.