Representations of men and male identities in Australian mass media

Abstract

Gender has been identified as a key element of human identity. Feminism has focussed particular attention on gender issues over the past five decades. Gender discourse has been dominated by discussion of women and women's issues - "feminists have somehow set the agenda for men's studies" as well as women studies. Mass media have been identified as key sites of discourse in feminist studies. Numerous studies have examined representations of women in mass media and argued that these have significant effects on women, on men, and on societies. A number of researchers have found that the treatment of men in mass media is not unproblematic and say that that feminist-led discourses have presented pictures of men as rapists, batterers, pornographers, child abusers, militarists, exploiters, and images of women as targets and victims. But studies of representations of men have been far fewer than those focussing on women. Furthermore, some media content analyses have been limited or unreliable because of small samples or lack of methodological rigor

Date of Award	2004
Original language	English