Abstract

“How can the media be changed? How can we free women from the tyranny of media messages limiting their lives to hearth and home?” Media sociologist Gaye Tuchman ends her celebrated essay “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media” with these two questions (Tuchman 1978: 38). Straightforward, confident, and unambiguous, from today’s vantage point the questions may seem naïve in their formulation. Yet in essence they encapsulate the concerns that continue to drive much feminist media analysis around the world almost four decades later. Despite enormous transformations in national and global media landscapes, and the development of infinitely more sophisticated approaches to media analysis and theorizing, the fundamental issues remain those that preoccupied Tuchman and her colleagues: power, values, representation, and identity.