Articles Review

Martin, Emily. 1991. "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles." Signs 16:485-501.

Brown, Jessica Autumn and Myra Marx Ferree. 2005. "Close Your Eyes and Think of England: Pronatalism in the British Print Media." Gender & Society 19:5-24.

Iyer, Radha. 2009. "Entrepreneurial identities and the problematic of subjectivity in media-mediated discourses." Discourse & Society 20:241-263.

Liechty, Mark. 2005. "Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu." Cultural Anthropology 20:1-38.

Messner, Michael A. 2000. "Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender." Gender and Society 14:765-784.

Our use of language in everydayness is culturally mediated. This mediation brings prejudicial notions of categories. This can be studied aptly through critical discourse analysis and it is, in all these 5 articles, the common methodology used to see stereotypes in the languages or texts. Through these discourses, the politics of representation and the power imbalances of our society can be seen through languages that is used in scientific and newspaper writings and words in common usage. In the two articles namely, “Entrepreneurial identities and the problematic of subjectivity in media-mediated discourses” and “Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu”, the discourses on gender is shown with the development of neo-liberal economy and how the ideas of patriarchy is shown in the binary of tradition/modernity, new women/old women, old times/new times etc.. In the article "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles", Emily Martin (1991) shows the proliferation of gender stereotypes produced by culture in the biology textbooks to define the reproductive capacity of men and women through gendered lens. Michael Messner (2000) in his article "Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender" demonstrates how a ‘multilevel analysis’ might reveal various levels of meaning that give insights into everyday social construction of gender through children’s world. Brown and Ferrie (2005) in their article "Close Your Eyes and Think of England: Pronatalism in the British Print Media" talk about the prophecy of print media to create a consciousness of crisis due to decreasing fertility and move beyond ‘potential economic logic’ to reflect a threat to culture and civilisation.

Iyer (2009) draws on the concept of ‘governmentality’ given by Foucault to show how media operates through subtle manipulation of individual subjectivities by regulating ‘the conduct of conducts’ through control on networks of power such as production practices, creation of new genres and dominant discourses. She uses the concept of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, given by Delueze and Guattris (1987), where ‘being’ shows the overarching control of patriarchal and colonial kinds over women in media industry and ‘becoming’ shows the resistance at a molecular level through ‘self-governance’ and multiple subject positions. She used 46 articles of various Indian newspaper and popular magazine from 1988 to 2002 to show discourses on femininity, patriarchy (microstructure) and oppositional discourse of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (macrostructure). She selects the time frame to properly accommodate the pre-liberalisation and post liberalisation discourses. However, her data is more skewed in post-liberalisation phase as the liberalisation of Indian economy was done in 1991. Further, she mainly focuses on headlines of the article to show these discourses which seems problematic in the modern age of rapid transfer of news items, where catchy-phrases are used to attract viewers. She does not compare news on gender discourses with other news items where same tactics is used for attracting attention. Further, when she talks about the oppositional discourse of ‘becoming’ then she does not take notice of women of many other industries where they have performed well like the success of entrepreneurs Indra Nooyi, Chanda Kochhar etc. whose educational background and efficient decision makings were popularised by media. She does not bring the ‘class-location’ of these successful entrepreneurs, who resisted the microstructures of these discourses like of femininity, patriarchy etc.  However, Mark Liechty (2005) brings these dimensions in his research of food and sex market of Kathmandu, Nepal.

He talks about the transformation of private and domesticated acts of bodily consumption into public and commoditized acts of transaction.  She uses the works of Elspeth Probyn and Leach to show how people make ritual and verbal meanings through the “doubleness of food and sex”. Further, he uses Timothy Gilfoyle’s review essay “Prostitution in History” (1999) to show the trajectory of prostitution from earlier societies to modern capitalistic society and gives the evidence of increasing trend of use of body as a commodity to be used in the process of exchange in the market for profit. The enormous proliferation of restaurant in Kathmandu shows the characters of gendered and class-based commensality. The emergence of ‘public spaces” in free market system with “free body” is based on four parameters cash, mobility, anonymity and fantasy. He develops the idea in the article that the logic of morality of caste, embedded in corporeal boundary and in food, is transgressed into a private domain, where the middle-class ideology of homogeneity based on class is playing main role in the process of exchange. The new form of morality in the market is not about the morality of women but about the morality of goods. He collected data from newly established clinics to treat sexually transmitted disease, social workers and the journalists of the magazines involved in the investigation of the networks of prostitution. However, the logic of caste among the sex workers is missing as the terms “fashion women” and new women are showing new values of consumption but it is not showing the fact that the women engaged in sex workers are from which caste groups and what economic logic induces them to come and work in sex market. As, Iyer (2009), in her article, showed the economic logic through the act of entrepreneurship and the modes of ‘molecular resistance’ among new women. Also, he establishes causal relationship between pornography and prostitution through the meanings processed by the images seems problematic as pornography is not banned or promoted to increase prostitution rather for saving the ‘values’ attached in the exchange processes.

The politics of representation of women is not limited to these domains of market rather it is evident in the domain of academics. As, Emily Martin (1991) has shown, in the article "The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles", the use of socially formed stereotypes in the descriptions of ‘egg’ and ‘sperms’. The masculine role of sperm is highly exaggerated in biology and the egg is seen as degenerative and expelling part of reproductive system. The social construction of active and passive behaviours attached with male and female in the society is transported to biology to explain reproductive phenomena in a scientific way. Since, natural science implants dominant value in society therefore these gendered values are transformed into society to give explanations for natural phenomenon. Like Iyer (2009), she is also talking about creation of ‘discourses’ on gendered notion, however, explicitly through the example of mode of sitting of male and female and attached notion of occupied space with it or the notion of ‘soft touch’ from female and ‘hard touch’ from male. She used the books of undergraduate and graduate courses of medical science used in John Hopkins University and other material reserved in the library to be used by the students of medical science. However, this notion is also used in Brown and Ferree’s (2005) article "Close Your Eyes and Think of England: Pronatalism in the British Print Media" to show how newspapers attributes reproductive role to women only.

They find conflicting relationship between nationalism and feminism. The nationalist discourses talk about reproduction- a role that they attach only with women and make declining rate of fertility a national crisis. Pronatalist discourses has become a part of democratic discourses in UK and Europe. They use McQuail’s (1994) work to show how decline in birth rate will become a ‘real macroeconomic problem’ for the nation as the decline will affect quantity of human labour and that will have effects of fiscal health of the nation. They used Hilgartner, Bosk and Stone, Gitlin and others to show how media attention is not properly distributed according to actual severity of the matter. They collected articles, for data analysis, between January 1, 2000 and May 15, 2002, which expressed concern for declining fertility. They classify these 146 documents into different categories based on its concern about the issue. These articles show gender biased view of the reproduction system. Most of the articles give the reproductive role to women and leave the responsibility of the sexual relationship, parenthood etc. from the role of men of our society. These articles use four modes of discourses – lecturing, threatening, bribing and begging-- to induce them to reproduce more children to save civilizational aspects of European civilisation.  The most important debate that is emerging from this article is the issue of migration. However, this article talks about migration in detail but it misses the point that the fear of declining population is more from the migration. These media discourses are not more concerned about declining fertility in the country rather they do not want the replacement of ‘original’ population from the migrant population. It can be seen more clearly in the light of recent refugee crisis in Europe from the people of Middle East. Since, Europe is unable to stop human migration from other parts of the world as it needs cheap labour but there is also a growing fear of demographic disturbances that it might cause in the continent. These media articles have many consequences in the society as these are developing new kinds of discourses and some of these are against the basic economic principles and some are enforcing cultural, political and religious goals. In neoliberalism, Industrial societies see declining population as one of the virtue unlike socialist and communist society. But, these discourses are found on the contrary of an economic system of this part of the world. Further, these discourses also indoctrinate population and give them certain ideologies which is in-sync with the ideology of nation-state.

In this situation, the article "Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender" by Michael Messner (2000) comes as an eye-opener, where he talks about ‘doing gender’ by children through the example of sports. He is not concerned about the question why boys and girls are different rather how and when they are made different to each other. He gives a structural constructionist approach to gender. She based her work on Thorne’s (1993) sociological analysis of children and how interactions provide symbolic resources to activate gender. He draws on Hochschild’s concept of “magnified moment” to study one heightened experience to see the construction of gender among children. He uses interactionist, structural and cultural theory approach to study it. The use of three approaches comes from the fact that ‘gender as performance’, given by Judith Butler, does not take into account the structural construction and unity and mobilisation at a structural level. Children are segregated in different gendered camps to forge unity and this unity is not among themselves rather it is coming against ‘other’ gender. Boys are trained to show masculinity in the field to prove their power and domination in sports ground. Further, the names and symbols chosen for teams are also gendered. It is like the description of ‘sperm’ and ‘egg’ in physiology textbooks to show boys as an active agent and girls as a passive agent in the construction of social meanings.

All these articles show the gendered construction of language and behaviour in our everydayness, which is coming through the mediation of our culture. Emily Martin in her article says that we should completely ‘de-naturalise’ our language from social convention of gender. However, these social stereotypes have become so much embedded in our language that it became impossible to completely de-naturalise it. However, unconscious use of stereotypical description of gender can be avoided through this. Radha Iyer (2009) develops the idea of molecular resistance by women through entrepreneurship. She gives a new concept of entrepreneurship as a tool for “total empowerment” of women. Mark Liechety (2005) traces transgression of earlier moral values in the exchange of food and sex in modern capitalist society and development of prostitution with the development of new public spaces in Kathmandu.  

However, one basic premise is related to all these five articles, which is coming from the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis. All of these articles starts with the idea of society being patriarchal and modern economic system being exploitative. Therefore, it comes with a bias even before the research started. Also, these papers are not talking about the processes through which these journalistic works are emerging especially editing and selection of these reports. Therefore, it does not talk about the agents and patients of these work. Also, discourses cannot be coherent but these analysis reach a point where coherent outputs are coming.