Bride Kidnapping in the News

kidnap2.jpg from Noriko Hayashi's "Grab and Run: Kyrgyzstan's Bride Kidnappings"-- Newsweek (Web)
http://www.newsweek.com/grab-and-run-1634

US Media Representations of Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

by B.F.

In her 2001 article “Feminism versus multiculturalism”, Leti Volpp argues^[1] that minority women are frequently portrayed as “victims of their culture”. That is, Western accounts of violence against minority women tend to paint minority women as lacking in agency, and completely under the control of “cultural” forces (which somehow do not affect white, Western women). One particular problem to which this applies is that of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (and Central Asia in general). There have been a few representations of this phenomenon in US media in the past ten years, most of which have confirmed Volpp’s thesis. I will examine these representations in depth, and argue for change in US media reporting of foreign violence against women. In particular, we will see that there is some misrepresentation of bride kidnapping in US media, and that there are many parallels that can and should be drawn between bride kidnapping and violence against women in the United States. Because this is inherently a women’s issue, we will be referencing work from feminist media studies and feminist anthropology.

Bride kidnapping is a phenomenon in Central Asia, and Kyrgyzstan in particular, that has gone through an “apparent resurgence”^[2] since the decline of the Soviet Union. It tends to involve the abduction of a woman by a man for marriage with or without her consent. The nonconsensual ones (the ones that are the topic of this paper) often involve “three or four men, a car and vodka”.^[3]The woman is often captured during the day as she is walking down the street, or alternatively, she is lured out of her residence at night to be abducted. This is often a traumatic experience for the victim of the kidnapping. Kidnapped women are frequently raped or face threats of rape if they do not accept the marriage.^[4] Furthermore, if a kidnapped woman escapes, she is often rejected by her family and village, either because she has dishonored Kyrgyz tradition^[5], or because the kidnapping itself dishonored her family, and the only way to restore honor is to go through with the marriage^[6], or possibly for some other reason, depending on the analysis. Bride kidnapping can be viewed through a broader lens of a desire to go back to “traditional” Kyrgyz customs after gaining independence from the Soviet Union.^[7]

There are several reasons why bride kidnapping is a particularly interesting phenomenon to consider in the context of US media representations of violence against foreign women. There has not been so much reporting done on bride kidnapping in the first place, compared to many other reports of “conflicts” of women’s rights with multiculturalism. For example, there have been many more discussions in the Western media of various institutions banning the wearing of hijabs. Because of the relative lack of reporting on bride kidnapping, I imagine that there is also a less “self-aware” reporting. That is, the reporting that we see is not filtered through a lens of awareness of minority women’s rights, which might come about from discussions about a phenomenon that is reported on more frequently. Thus, I think that by studying a less well-known phenomenon, we can see more directly the ways that news institutions themselves view violence against women perpetrated in other countries.

In “Feminism versus multiculturalism”, Leti Volpp gives one perspective on how minority women are represented in the West. She writes that “incidents of sexual violence in the West are frequently thought to reflect the behavior of a few deviants – rather than as part of our culture”, whereas acts of violence in the Third World “are thought to characterize the cultures of entire nations.”⁸ She argues that the consequences of this representation is that women (particularly those from non-Western cultures) are deprived of agency in Western culture. That is, they are portrayed as victims, and not as people who have power to change their situations.

In my opinion, one of the major contributions to this characterization of non-Western women is the way that they are represented in Western media. My aim is to study in the particular case of Kyrgyz bride kidnappings how this is done. By looking at specific reports about bride kidnappings in the US media, I will describe the ways in which the reports support Volpp’s ideas. We will see that the representations of Kyrgyz women serve to preserve a cultural hierarchy that places the West at the top.

My method of research is as follows. I have studied three news reports on Kyrgyz bride kidnapping from the United States. The first is a website published by PBS including an article about bride kidnapping, a video, and some facts and pictures; this was published online in March of 2004. The second source is an ordinary news article published in the New York Times written by Craig S. Smith and published in April of 2005. Finally, my third source is a 2013 photo essay by Noriko Hayashi published on the Newsweek website. I want to use these reports from the last ten years to look at how modern US media portrays violence against women in other cultures, to confirm Volpp’s thesis about representations of “other” women.

All of the news reports studied included pictures of Kyrgyzstan and Kyrgyz people along with the text. In many ways, the way they use photography already marks a distinction between Western people and Kyrgyz people. They almost always depict women in “traditional” dress, often in situations that emphasize their cultural distance from the Western world. The PBS report, for example, includes many pictures of Kyrgyzstan, none of which have anything to do with the subject of bride kidnapping. Most of the pictures are of rural scenery; one of them is a picture of a woman milking a mare. All of this serves to exoticize Kyrgyzstan to the Western eye, emphasizing the differences between the experiences of the intended readers of the news and the subjects of the reports.

In some ways, there is nothing wrong with these choices of pictures. Bride kidnapping is a primarily rural phenomenon in Kyrgyzstan, and perhaps the more westernized Kyrgyz people, who might be easier to identify with for viewers of PBS, are not very likely to be kidnapped. However, I want to argue that while these depictions may be realistic, they may not always be relevant. This is an important distinction to make in these situations. There are two ways in which we are influenced by news. First of all, the facts that we learn from the news can affect the way we think about things. But, secondly, the way that news reports frame stories is just as important as, if not more important than the facts presented. While the pictures of rural Kyrgyz people we can find on the PBS website may be representative of what things really look like, the question that really needs to be asked is what purpose these photographs serve. To me it appears that they only serve to exoticize Kyrgyz people, and thus provide a way to separate the situations from Western readers of the article from those of the subjects of the article.

The Newsweek article studied relies even more heavily on photography than the PBS report. It too contains many pictures of people in traditional clothing, but now the pictures are more focused on people than landscapes. They are mostly taken indoors, and in all but one of the photographs, the subject of the picture is a person or group of people. These photographs mostly depict people in traditional dress, just as on the PBS website. However, what is most striking about the pictures here is that the people portrayed always look dejected, with their faces usually turned away from the camera. This is different from the representations of the PBS website in that everything is not as clearly focused on the cultural differences between Kyrgyzstan and the West. However, the dispirited people depicted in the photographs do invite the viewer to think of Kyrgyz people as victimized. This is in line with Volpp’s analysis of depictions of minority women: they are often portrayed as victims, and as lacking in agency.

We see that the Newsweek article too frames the suffering of Kyrgyz women in a particular way. By portraying Kyrgyz people (women in particular) as victims, it deprives them of agency. Again, it is certainly true that a large portion of Kyrgyz women are “victims of their culture” in some sense, but by framing this suffering in a context only of victimization, the essay paints a very one-dimensional picture of what the situation of Kyrgyz women is like.

The news reports also tend to unquestioningly take the stance that there is a “correct” culture, i.e. the Western one, and that non-western cultures should aspire to be more Western. This is very evident on the PBS website, which invites readers to answer the question “Should the international community intervene when cultural traditions clash with modern notions of women’s rights?”^[8]This makes it clear that the authors are painting a cultural hierarchy. One should ask oneself why the “international” (presumably this means Western) community should be intervening in Kyrgyz affairs. Certainly nobody asks whether the international community should intervene when women are raped in the United States, even though this is something that happens systematically.

The short documentary film that can be viewed on the same website poses near the end the question of the morality of bride kidnappings given that many of the abducted women end up happy in the resulting marriage. This particular question is often portrayed as a unique ethical problem facing the people of Kyrgyzstan. The New York Times article I studied spends many paragraphs describing the violent kidnapping of one woman against her will, and then ends up with a few short sentences about how she is happy with the arrangement now. I think that these descriptions serve to portray other cultures as particularly violent compared to Western ones. Furthermore, by noting that there clearly is some ethical dilemma at hand here, but not asking Kyrgyz people for their opinions, they implicitly make the claim that it is the duty of Western people to make judgments about the morality of events in other countries.

At this point, I think that I have established that the portrayal of Kyrgyz women in major US media outlets has to some extent deprived them of agency by depicting them as victims of their culture. This is not an unusual phenomenon; Volpp discusses it in some generality in her paper. It has also been studied in some other specific cases. For example, Reimers describes in her paper “Representations of an honor killing” how very much the same phenomenon has occurred in Sweden regarding discussions of honor killings by Kurdish immigrants^[9]. She comes to the conclusion, very similarly to me, that Swedish representations of these killings contribute to a picture of Swedish culture as “superior” to Kurdish culture. She writes that “the purported difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ intersect with a nationalistic and colonial discourse.”^[10] I now want to look more closely at how portrayals of Kyrgyz women serve to elevate Western culture above other cultures, and in particular describe how this in itself can be seen as an act of violence against the women of Kyrgyzstan.

One analysis of violence is put forward by Patricia Hill Collins, in her paper “The tie that binds: race, gender, US violence.” She argues that violence is often defined in a way that benefits people who are higher up in some social hierarchy, and that the acceptance of these definitions leads to a perpetuation of those hierarchies.^[11] One example she gives is that “American soldiers who killed people during the Gulf war were excused and even celebrated,” whereas “civilians killing police in inner-city neighborhoods remain vilified.”^[12] From these observations, Collins argues for a broader definition of violence, which should better take into account the suffering of socially disadvantaged people. She writes that violence can “be viewed as a group-based institution of abuse”^[13]; this will be an important frame of reference for my analysis.

To elaborate on this idea, we can note that even according to traditional definitions, violence can be conceptualized as an act that limits another persons freedom, albeit usually physically. However, from a point of view of analyzing injustices, there is no clear reason to limit one’s definition of violence to the physical. To make a distinction between abusive acts that are physical and ones that are not physical does not seem entirely justified. In fact, such an approach could possibly serve to make abuses against people in oppressed positions seem less noteworthy than other abuses. It is frequently the case that minorities are portrayed in a stereotypical way in the media, while people in privileged positions can play many different roles. By claiming that media representations cannot constitute acts of violence, we are thus supporting a definition of violence that supports already existing hierarchies. It is in this context that I will examine the violence implicit in US representations of Kyrgyz bride kidnapping.

I think that it is appropriate to apply an analysis similar to that of Patricia Hill Collins to the reports on bride kidnapping studied here. As we have seen, the role of Kyrgyz people in the reporting done on bride kidnapping is always limited to providing facts and experiences, but they are never asked for their own analyses of the culture behind bride kidnapping. This upholds a cultural hierarchy that says that people from the West tend to be more neutral and disinterested than non-Westerners. People from other cultures are depicted as too bound by their culture to think rationally about moral questions, while Western people are able to look at things from a neutral perspective, either because they somehow are capable of diassociating themselves from their culture, or because the culture that is there is a culture of rationality from the beginning.

Furthermore, the portrayal of Kyrgyz women as victims rather than agents perpetuates certain Western ideas about “other cultures.” Volpp writes the following about the distinction between agents and victims.

The binary assumption that women in the West have choice, and that those in immigrant and Third World contexts have none, in part reflects the limits of our language in describing choice: Either one is an agent, or one is a victim. This binary also reflects historical representations of the West as the site of rugged individualism, and the East as the repository of passivity and culture.^[14]

That is, the portrayal of Kyrgyz women as victims upholds a long-standing tradition in the West of denying non-Western women agency. This is certainly an act of violence in the sense of Collins; it is a systematic abuse of a large group of underprivileged people. It is interesting to note that the way that women in non-Western cultures are portrayed as victims of their culture stands in stark contrast to the way that violence against Western women is portrayed in the United States. A complaint often raised about US news coverage of rapes in the United States is that they fail to take into account cultural conditions that are conducive to rape.^[15]

In light of this analysis of violence, I hope that it is clear how the representations studied here indeed do constitute an act of violence against Kyrgyz people, and Kyrgyz women in particular. Geopolitically, rural Kyrgyz people are typically not in a position of power, and the way that they are portrayed here only perpetuates this. They are portrayed as people to feel sorry for, not as people to identify with, or as people with their own agency.

I now want to discuss how news reporting can be transformed to depict the situation of women in Kyrgyzstan without painting them in a way that furthers Western cultural dominance over the East. Recall that there are two main aspects to the way that someone is represented in the news: the facts given, and the way that these facts are framed to give a complete picture of the situation. Of course there is a large amount of overlap between these two aspects; the choice of facts presented clearly contributes to the way that reports frame people. That is, for any given event, there are many facts about the event that can be presented in the news, and only a small number of these facts can be given. In any case, what needs to be changed is the framing of the reports. All of the news articles I have read do report accurate facts (to my knowledge), and I do think that it is important for people in the United States to be aware of the situation of women in Kyrgyzstan, but I do not think that the way that the women are portrayed represents them fairly. One way to ensure that women are portrayed fairly is to report through a transveral lens.

Transversal politics is a form of analysis which “emphasizes coalition building that takes into account the specific positions of ‘political actors.”’^[16] Handrahan writes about transversalism that it “involves maintaining a starting/standing point/perspective coupled with the flexibility to recognize, but not homogenize, other starting/standing point/perspectives.”^[17] We want an analysis that firmly acknowledges that all people are different in their backgrounds, their points of view, their identites, and so on, while simultaneously allowing for empathy between people with different backgrounds. One way to achieve such an empathy is by emphasizing abstract similarities between different people’s positions, while still acknowledging the potentially large differences between them as well. I believe that such an approach would be well-suited for descriptions of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan.

There are many abstract similarities between Kyrgyz bride kidnapping and the problems that affect women in the United States. For example, one pervasive problem in the United States is sexual assault on university campuses.^[18] Abstractly, I think that there are many similarities between bride kidnapping and campus rape. First of all, they are both acts of violence that affect mostly women. Furthermore, the victims (and perpetrators) are often young, and there is often alcohol involved.^[19] Finally, the perpetrators are often acquaintances of the victims. Note that I do not mean to equate bride kidnapping with campus rape. What I want to show is that US media outlets can and should emphasize that there are similarities between the sexual violence faced by young women in Kyrgyzstan and in the United States, while still acknowledging the (vast) differences. Such an approach would serve to humanize Kyrgyz women, instead of victimizing them.

We now turn to the discussion of the ethics of bride kidnapping from earlier. We noted that one of the questions often brought up in reports on bride kidnapping is how to approach the phenomenon given that many of the resulting marriages actually end up happy. It is often portrayed as a cultural curiosity that Kyrgyz women can choose to be happy with people who have committed acts of violence against them. However, I would argue that there are certain similarities between this and the phenomenon of women who choose to remain with their abusive spouses in the United States. Again, there are many differences between the specific situation of spousal abuse in the United States and bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, but perhaps by looking at the similarities we can understand better the situations of women both in the United States and in Kyrgyzstan, and more importantly, it would allow for more connection and empathy between the women in the different situations.

Of course, there are certain aspects of bride kidnapping that are not quite analogous with any phenomena in the United States. For example, we have noted that some reporters view the increased amount of bride kidnappings since the fall of the Soviet Union as a way for a Kyrgyz national identity to assert itself. This might be difficult to relate to a US context. However, we must keep in mind that the important thing is not necessarily to paint all violence against women as being similar or even analogous, but just to always remind people that foreign women cannot (and should not) be viewed entirely as victims without agency, and that while their situation is different from those of the audience of the news, it can still be understood and related to the personal lives of the audience. We must also keep in mind that there is no one “Western” experience; there are many types of people in the West who face many different kinds of oppression. Still, by connecting the suffering of Kyrgyz women to suffering that is at least geographically closer, if nothing else, to the audience of the news, we can hope to evoke at least some additional understanding.

We have seen that the way that bride kidnapping is reported on in the US media is flawed in many ways. It depicts violence against Kyrgyz women in a way that portrays Kyrgyz women only as victims, and not as agents. This is a common feature of media portrayals of non-Western women as well as Western minority women both historically and in the present. The result of these portrayals is a preservation of a cultural hierarchy that places the West at the top, and regards other cultures as inferior and oppressive. This stands in contrast to the way Western media depicts violence against women occurring in the West, with Western perpetrators. In order to portray the people of Kyrgyzstan in a more respectful way, we must turn to a transversal reporting of their situation, and try to connect their lives to the lives of Western people.

Works Cited

Akiner, S. (1997). Between tradition and modernity: the dilemma facing contemporary Central

Asian women. In M. Buckley (Ed.), Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia (pp. 261–304). Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, E. A., Hamilton, L., & Sweeney, B. (2006). Sexual assault on campus: A multilevel, integrative approach to party rape. Social Problems, 53(4), 483–499.

Collins, P. H. (1998). The tie that binds: race, gender and US violence. Ethnic and Racial Studies,

21(5), 917–938.

FRONTLINE/World: Kyrgyzstan - The Kidnapped Bride. (2004, March). http://www.pbs.org/

frontlineworld/stories/kyrgyzstan/thestory.html.

Handrahan, L. (2004). Hunting for women: bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6(2), 207–233.

Hayashi, N. (2013, November 4). Grab and Run: Kyrgyzstan’s Bride Kidnappings. Newsweek.

Reimers, E. (2007). Representations of An Honor Killing: Intersections of discourses on culture, gender, equality, social class, and nationality. Feminist Media Studies, 7(3), 239–255.

Smith, C. S. (2005, April 30). Abduction, often violent, a Kyrgyz wedding rite. The New York

Times.

Volpp, L. (2001). Feminism versus multiculturalism. Columbia Law Review, 101(5), 1181–1218.

Werner, C. (2009). Bride abduction in post-Soviet Central Asia: marking a shift towards patriarchy through local discourses of shame and tradition. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(2), 314–331.

Worthington, N. (2008). Progress and persistent problems: Local TV news framing of acquaintance rape on campus. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 1–16.

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Footnotes:

[1] Volpp, 2001.

[2] Werner, 2009, p. 316.

[3] Handrahan, 2004, p. 209.

[4] Handrahan, 2004.

[5] Handrahan, 2004.

[6] Werner, 2009.

[7] Akiner, 1997 says that after the dissolution of the Soviet union some Kyrgyz women “feel the need to return to their ‘authentic’ roots; Handrahan, 2004 writes that bride kidnapping “has come to be understood as a fundamental ‘Kyrgyz tradition’ neither imposed nor transported but home-grown on the jailoos (mountain pastures) of the Tien Shen mountain range.” ⁸Volpp, 2001, p. 1186-1187.

[8] “FRONTLINE/World: Kyrgyzstan - The Kidnapped Bride,” 2004.

     [9] Reimers, 2007.

     [10] Reimers, 2007, p. 251.

     [11] Collins, 1998.

     [12] Collins, 1998, p. 922.

     [13] Collins, 1998, p. 921.

     [14] Volpp, 2001, p. 1211.

 [15] Worthington, 2008, p. 13 gives an example of even a relatively “progressive” report on a rape which still “focused so much on the specifics of the scandal without reference to broader social structures that facilitate violence against women.

     [16] Collins, 1998, p. 930.

     [17] Handrahan, 2004, p. 211.

     [18] See Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney, 2006 for an in-depth analysis of rape at one university.

 [19] Handrahan, 2004 gives an analysis of the importance of vodka in Kyrgyz bride kidnappings, and Armstrong et al., 2006 discusses in depth how alcohol shapes sexual assault on US university campuses.

Reporting on Campus Assault at Cornell

Sexual Violence, Media and Feminism:

A Local and Industry-Wide Perspective

By Anonymous

            Various local media outlets, including the student publication The Cornell Daily Sun, covered a sexual assault[1] that occurred in spring 2013 and was reported to the police. The details of the story itself as well as the consequences of insensitive media coverage were explosive. Beyond the individual harms such stories can cause the victim, flawed media[2] coverage of sexual assault can serve to perpetuate sexist understandings of rape and oppressive gender norms. A significant portion of this paper will outline a set of feminist criteria by which The Sun’s sexual assault reporting should be judged. It will also consider explanations for bias in such reporting and propose feminist solutions.

Background Information

            Media sexual assault coverage has been problematic even before modern times. Historically, media only deemed violence against women worth covering in a racially biased context, or when the rape of a white woman by a black man was named as the reason for lynching (Benedict, p. 25). The mainstream press did not cover rapes diverging from this racial stereotype until the 1950s (Benedict, p. 27), with consistent media coverage of sexual assault only emerging in the 1970s (Kitzinger, p. 15). Even then, sexual assault coverage was riddled with overtly gendered and racial bias, with victims depicted as “the wives, daughters, or ‘coeds,’ symbols of white America, ‘taken from their men by rapists” (Benedict, p. 39).

Feminist activism has resulted in major improvements in the tone and framing of rape coverage in recent decades, but biases still linger. Reporting consistently fails to provide an accurate depiction of the most common types of rape (Simpson and Cote, p.165) and the rapes media do cover tend to stereotype the victims and create stories more in line with rape mythology[3] than the crime’s reality (Benedict, p.14-18). Even reports that have been praised for reporting on sexual assault in a proactive, in-depth way — such as the Pulitzer-prize winning Ziegenmeyer-Schorer report in 1990, which described a rape survivor’s first year of recovery— have come under attack for embodying various biases about rape that are uncommon, like stranger rape (Simpson and Cote, p. 157). The Ziegenmeyer-Schorer report thus shows that attempts to rid media coverage of myths and stereotypes is a long road indeed, with “even the most careful reporting … [running] afoul of biases” (Simpson and Cote, p. 159).

Feminist Significance

            At its most basic, feminism aims to end “sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression” (bell hooks). Media coverage of sexual assault is anti-feminist when it stereotypes female victims, manipulates their stories for mass appeal and as a result, treats both the victims themselves and all women unjustly, impeding their autonomy by placing blame for rape on their actions, not those of the perpetrator. Rape is different from other crimes in that the way it is perceived and interpreted reflects deep-seated societal beliefs about gender roles and sexual relations (Benedict, p.4). The way media covers violence against women both reflects public opinion — as well as public misconceptions — about sexual assaults and shapes the way people continue to perceive sexual assaults. This mechanism is primarily at play when media upholds and continues to spread rape myths, which, through their dichotomous portrayal of rape victims as either virgins attacked by monstrous perpetrators or as temptresses who lured their rapists (O’Hara, p. 248), undermine the realities of the pervasiveness of rape and the nature of the crime — it is a crime, one of opportunity, not of passion or of sex (Benedict, p. 16). Far from being monsters or deviants, male rapists are friends or casual acquaintances, known to the victim than not (Simpson and Cote, p165). Rape myths also place the impetus on women to constrain their independence to prevent rape — not to go certain places or do certain things or stay out at certain hours — because male perpetrators are monsters, not in control of their own urges, strangers in the night that could be lurking anywhere. When media coverage of rapes emphasizes the victim’s agency over the agency of the perpetrator, or through language and framing of a story minimizes the damage the crime has incurred on the victim, it serves to enforce what Meyers describes as “social structures and values that deny male violence against women … a serious, systemic problem rooted in misogyny and patriarchy” (Meyers, p. ix).

            Feminist scholars have concluded that the process by which news stories are selected by media to be covered is inherently biased. Reporters’ selection criteria of ‘unusualness’ allows reporters to internalize societal gender, race and class biases and results in coverage that focuses on crimes against whites over crimes against minorities (Meyers, p.99-100). Black female victims of rape experience this bias in media coverage in an intersectional[4] way, subject to both sexism and racism. Media is less likely to cover the rape of a black woman, and when they do reporters are more likely to question the victim’s claims (Kitzinger, p. 30). In addition, when media does decide that a black rape victim is “credible and worthy,” they portray her in such a way that they erase her race, granting her “honorary whiteness” (Kitzinger, p. 31). Interlocking sexism and racism in media coverage of the rapes of black victims show us “society’s biases and prejudices. It tells us who is valued and who is not, whose life has meaning and whose life is insignificant, who has power and who does not” (Meyers p. 98).

Research Question

            How does the media perpetuate rape myths in its sexual assault coverage? “Alleged Rape Victim Details Attack to IPD” by Kerry Close, an account of the rape of a Cornell student as told to local police that was published in The Cornell Daily Sun on April 4, 2013, is proof that when it does occur it is not deliberately done. Just six months previous to the publishing of this article, the Cornell campus had seen a spate of sexual assaults occur over Labor Day Weekend 2012. The campus was in crisis over the issue of rape culture and the University launched several working groups to combat what was seen as a widespread problem. The April 4 article was the first sexual assault reported since the three sexual assaults that had been reported the previous semester.

“Alleged Rape Victim Details Attack to IPD” recounted how a Cornell student woke up at 4:45 a.m. to find she was being raped, as well as the sequence of events leading up to the crime — the victim’s actions that night, the fact that the victim’s girlfriend fought the rapist off, the way the perpetrator entered the building (he was in the victim’s girlfriend’s house playing drinking games with some of her housemates) and the way the victim’s girlfriend took pictures of the rapist so he could be identified. Adapting media guidelines for ethical sexual assault reporting to a feminist perspective on the issue (Garcia-Rojas; Simpson and Cote p. 160; Benedict p. 259), [SH1] “Alleged Rape Victim Details Attack to IPD” can be evaluated by five criteria.

1.      Contextualizing: promotes incorporating broader contextual and statistical information into single-event stories in order to portray institutionalized structures that allow for sexism and sexist oppression.

2.      Framing: emphasizes neutrality in the way the story is told through focusing inquiry and investigations on the perpetrator rather than the victim. This perspective allows for the correction of media’s sexist focus on the victim’s actions, which frame the story as if her actions played a role in her rape.

3.      Language: encourages using language that is truthful to the crime at hand, without implying that rape or assault is sex or using words like ‘assault’ in a way that detracts from the victim’s claims. This focus aims to focus reporter attention on the gendered bias that has been entrenched even in our system of language.

4.      Level of detail included: attempts to portray the extent of the crime that was committed. Not including graphic details of rape in the same way as other crimes is sexist, minimizing the suffering of predominantly female victims.  

5.      Anticipate the impact of publication: ensures the published product does not harm who have been rape victims; in particular, protecting the anonymity of the specific victim in the case. This is crucial to allowing women the possibility of choice — allowing them to heal and live a life defined beyond the status of victim.   

Feminist Analysis

            Close’s article could have been further developed to allow for a feminist understanding of rape, both the specific rape at hand as well as rape as a reflection of sexist norms. Firstly, the crime at hand — acquaintance rape — could have been contextualized much better, adding information to demystify the myth that rapes are perpetrated by a stranger emerging from the bushes in the night. An important statistic that could have been included is the fact that half of rape victims in 2010 were raped by an acquaintance (Garcia-Rojas, p. 31). Moreover, the article failed to address the severity of college campus rape culture — the fact that one in four or one in five women will be the victims of completed or attempted rape while in college (Armstrong, Hamilton and Sweeney, p. 483). The article could have gone on to explain the institutionalized sexism that allows for rape to occur, such as the variety of “individual, organizational and interactional levels” at college campus, including university policies that push drinking off-campus and social expectations that college kids will drink and party (Armstrong, Hamilton and Sweney).

            Another significant issue in media sexual assault coverage that can be seen in a more minor form here is how the assault is framed. It is seen in The Sun’s coverage through the focus on the victim’s actions the night of the assault — her going to a bar earlier that evening, the amount of alcohol she drank (two beers, a shot of tequila, and a whiskey and coke) and her state of intoxication (“moderately intoxicated”) (Close, p. 1).  These descriptions, while not particularly important to the rape itself — since rapes are not caused by women drinking or going to bars but by rapists wanting to rape women (Benedict, p. 16) — serve to victim-blame by directing excessive focus on the victim’s actions that night, implying that the places she went or the things she drank contributed to her being raped.

            For the most part the article uses clear, simple language that serves to emphasize the crime being a rape rather than referring to it by any terms implying consent was involved. Yet there are three areas where language could have been used more effectively and sensitively. One sentence of the article reads, “At about 4:45 a.m., the victim woke up and realized she was being raped” (Close, p.1). This passive formulation of the crime quite literally constructs the sentence so that it conceals the rapist; it also serves to put the focus on the victim in relation to the crime rather than the perpetrator (Garcia-Rojas, p. 15). Although the author likely structured the sentence in this manner — in the victim’s voice — because the reporting was based off of a report given by the victim to police, a better sentence might have read “A man entered the bedroom and raped the sleeping victim, which she woke up to at about 4:45 a.m.” In addition, the term ‘victim’ is used about 20 times throughout the article. Those who have undergone sexual assault prefer the term ‘survivor,’ as it gives them more autonomy over the trauma they have suffered. Moreover, though ‘alleged’ is used only twice in the article, it is used in the most visible places in the article, the headline and the first sentence. Because legal charges had been filed against the perpetrator, Peter Mesko, at the time of publication, instead the same concepts could have been attributed as “police say,” so as to not undermine the victim’s words (Garcia-Rojas, p. 11).

            The article, while providing an extremely detailed account regarding the victim’s actions that night, fails to provide much information about the rape itself, other than the victim waking up to the rape and saying, “I don’t like that, stop!” (Close, p.1). The lack of graphic detail, while possibly due to the reporter’s squeamishness, the lack of access to the details and The Sun’s status as a student-run newspaper, may have served to minimize the severity of the rape and, as a result, the victim’s suffering (Garcia-Rojas, p. 12).

            The final criterion — considering the impact of publication — is also the most troubling aspect of The Sun’s coverage of the April rape. The level of detail included about the victim, her girlfriend’s living situation and her girlfriend’s housemates’ group of friends, allowed for the victim to be identified through the media coverage. This is particularly egregious because privacy for survivors is an “essential condition for taking steps toward recovery” and allowing them to be given the choice whether to give or withhold their name is important, “profoundly” so (Simpson and Cote, p. 163). Simpson and Cote write that the journalist who denies or invades privacy of rape survivor interferes right to try to recover from assault (Simpson and Cote, p. 164). Ultimately, while all five criteria are important considerations in media sexual assault coverage, the issue of the victim’s identity is the most crucial consideration — and is the area in which insensitive coverage can lead to the most devastating personal impacts.

Issues raised by literature

            Feminist media studies analyses in this area have identified structural problems in the media industry, arguing that the way news media apply standards of newsworthiness is inherently biased. Although, when selecting stories to pursue, reporters cite valuing audience interest, the degree to which the story affects many lives and the timeliness of the issue, Meyers found that instead, the criteria of “unusualness” seems to override those factors. This means in practice, reporters only consider rapes newsworthy if they involve a serial rapist, the rape of someone very old or very young, or what reporters consider unusual circumstances (Meyers p. 93). Without a standard approach to evaluate newsworthiness, unusualness allows reporters to rely on rape myths as well as gender, class and race biases in selecting stories to pursue. As a result, media coverage of sexual assault is skewed, with a disconnect between the stories about rape that are being told and the realities of the pervasiveness of acquaintance rape, the rarity of interracial rape, and so on.

            Individual cases of media reporting all-too-often fail to live up to the five criteria of feminist-minded sexual assault reporting mentioned above. In addition, although police spokespeople are often considered reliable, neutral sources, while advocates for rape victims are seen as biased because of their close work with those affected by the crime, such a perspective fails to consider the reality that no person can ever be truly neutral. Much like the feminist concept of situated knowledge, police spokespeople’s statements are as affected by their values and assumptions as advocates for rape victims (Meyers, p. 100).

My own analysis

            While feminist media studies have reached a general consensus on the consequences of biased media sexual assault coverage, they diverge in their analysis of why it occurs. Some scholars argue that media reporting is a results of reporters internalizing rape myths without even knowing it (O’Hara, p.247); other scholars more explicitly designate it as a form of social control over women — dictating the actions that are acceptable and the punishments for divergence (Meyers, p. 9). Some point to the lack of gender and racial diversity in most newsrooms across the country (Benedict, p. 202-203), in particular the lack of female writers covering rape stories, which is likely due to the fact that rape is a crime story and the crime desks are largely male-dominated (Benedict, p. 5). However, dissenting scholars note that rape stories can still be flawed even when written and supervised by female editors (Worthington, p.3). Though all of these factors are play a role, the most compelling reason for rape myth-prone media coverage is a variant of Meyers’ argument: although reporters go into the field for a variety of reasons, ultimately they want to tell good stories — stories that are captivating and universal, that will matter beyond the confines of their locality. Stories that follow the familiar rise and fall of rape mythology better fit the idea of a good story and capture the imagination than the realities of rape, which are far more insidious and frightening. The trope of the stranger in the bushes is more palatable than the uncle with the wandering hands at family gatherings.

            On the whole, while media studies summarize the roadblocks preventing more progressive media coverage of sexual assault, including the way competition, deadlines and journalistic traditions inhibit divergence from rape myths (Benedict, p.7), solutions are scarce. Educating reporters about feminist media criticism (Worthington, p.2) and increasing their awareness about specific reforms needed (Benedict, p. 259) have been some of the ideas bandied around. But individual reforms cannot serve to target the structural inequities in media sexual assault coverage, which hinge upon Meyers’ astute identification of the “unusualness” criteria of newsworthiness as a methodology — or lack thereof — exposing the process of story selection to biases.       

Critical engagement with the literature

            There is no doubt that the media has a tendency to align rape victims into stereotypes of female behavior, either blameless virgins or alluring temptresses, “imposing these shared narratives … on the sex crimes they cover like a cookie-cutter on dough” (Benedict, p. 24).

Yet rapes do occur that fit these stereotypes, even if just partially, which presents a bind for reporters — whether to alter reality to avoid a polarizing portrayal, or to report the facts even if they play into Benedict’s virgin/vamp dichotomy. Although women who meet a man at a bar and have one too many drinks are not culpable in a resulting rape, the events of that night are part and parcel of how the crime occurred. There is a distinction between reporting the truth of a situation and claiming that women must not go out to bars or drink, and although it is a tricky line to tread it is one worth treading. Suppressing true stories that mimic rape myths is as damaging as suppressing true stories that are completely at odds with rape myths, since both hijack public discourse about gender. Gender bias can only be eliminated in sexual assault reporting by providing broad, comprehensive rape coverage, to expand ideas of rape beyond rape myths and portray the true terrain of such crimes.

Conclusion

Gender, race and class biases and tendencies towards rape myths exist in sexual assault reporting. One solution, a transformative feminist approach, requires local media cover every sexual assault, including attempted rapes, reported in their area. Since sexism is based on unequal valuation of people in society (bell hooks), and news coverage shows whom society values in selecting stories to tell, combating systematic institutionalized sexism in media requires such a move. If combined with proper education about sexual assault coverage grounded in feminist teachings, such a strategy will result in stories being told that more adequately represent the true risk of sexual assault in one’s community. Although such a move will still not truly represent the number of sexual assaults occurring in that community, as over 80% of rapes aren’t reported to the police (Simpson and Cote, p. 163-4), it will portray a more expansive, nuanced picture of sexual assaults and help to combat rape mythology.

The second solution, a reformative feminist approach, is similar to other proposals in that it requires reporters to be aware of their own biases (Cote and Simpson p.223-5, Meyers p.124, Benedict p. 251), but does not ask them to suppress information that backs up virgin/vamp stereotypes or rape myths, since asking such a thing is sexist — suppressing the validity of women being virgins or vamps. Feminism does not ask for women to not be either; rather, it asks for women to have the possibility to choose a wider range of possibilities of being. This feminist perspective can be applied through reporters drawing out the contradictions inherent in these stereotypes. This means subverting rape myths — the victim as both a loyal friend and a flirt — and questioning them — asking, like one reporter did, why women who consume alcohol are to be blamed for the rape (O’Hara, p. 254).

Only by expanding the conception of who gets raped — not the virgin or the vamp, which most women wouldn’t identify with, but the friend, sister, pet-owner — can we as a society combat the misconception that rape is about passion, lust, the actions of the victims or the perpetrator’s mental or drug/alcohol-related incapacities. Once rape mythology is revealed as farce and rape is understood as an act committed by friends, family and acquaintances, once victims are understood as having no culpability, can we move closer towards eliminating sexism, sexist exploitation and sexist oppression.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Elizabeth, Laura Hamilton, and Brian Sweeney. "Sexual Assault on Campus: A Multilevel, Integrative Approach to Party Rape." Social Problems 53.4 (2006): n. pag. Web.

Benedict, Helen. Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43.1241 (1993): n. pag. Print.

Close, Kerry. "Alleged Rape Victim Details Attack to IPD." The Cornell Daily Sun[Ithaca] 4 Apr. 2013, 129th ed., sec. 120: 1+. Print.

Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2000. Print.

Meyers, Marian. News Coverage of Violence against Women: Engendering Blame. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Print.

O'Hara, Shannon. "Monsters, Playboys, Virgins and Whores: Rape Myths in the News Media's Coverage of Sexual Violence." Language and Literature 21.3 (2012): 247-59. Monsters, Playboys, Virgins and Whores: Rape Myths in the News Media's Coverage of Sexual Violence. Web. 27 Nov. 2013.

"Reporting on Rape and Sexual Violence: A Media Toolkit for Local and National Journalists to Better Media Coverage." Ed. Claudia Garcia-Rojas. Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, n.d. Web.

Ross, Karen, and Carolyn M. Byerly. Women and Media: International Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Worthington, Nancy. "Progress and Persistent Problems: Local TV News Framing of Acquaintance Rape on Campus." Feminist Media Studies 8.1 (2008): n. pag. Web.

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[1] The term sexual assault will be used to refer to any type of sexual contact occurring without the recipient’s explicit consent, as defined by the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. The term will be used interchangeably with the term rape, and both will refer to rapes that are perpetrated against women, the scope of this paper. Although rape occurs within relationships, such as marital rape, this paper focuses exclusively on acquaintance rape — rape by a person who is known to the victim — and stranger rape, rape that is committed by someone unknown to the victim. Rape is understood in this paper as a forced violation of another person’s body, an act that is antithetical to sex and, in fact, can best be understood as sexual humiliation for the victim (Benedict, p. 254).

[2] Media, although it can refer to a wide array of mediums of mass communication, will in this paper only apply to newspaper coverage.

[3] [3] Rape myths are a variety of “prejudicial, stereotyped or false beliefs, prejudices or stereotypes about rape, rapists and rape victim[3]s” and encompass a variety of ideas about how rape occurs, including scenarios in which — through their actions that night, the drinks they consumed or the clothes they wore — victims are framed as liable for the violence they encounter; whereas the perpetrator is framed as being crazy and therefore, less culpable (O’Hara, p.247).

[4] Intersectional feminist activism studies the way in which systems of oppression are interlocked and thus how oppression can be suffered through multiple aspects of identity (Crenshaw, p. 1243). For example, black women experience oppression uniquely to the way a black man or white woman would. 

Imaging Black Women in Popular Media

 

The Representation of Black Women in the Media

by Ashleigh Williams and Michelle Lee

Our nation was founded on the principle “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. However, throughout the course of history, it has become evident that these unalienable rights are only granted to white men. Individuals who are not protected by this particular race and gender category have been historically subjected to legal sanctions that are indicative of their subordination in society. Thus, a social hierarchy has emerged in which groups of individuals are ranked based on their race and gender respectively, placing black women at the bottom of this system. Due to their low rank in this system, black women have continuously faced various forms of exploitation in the public sphere. This public exploitation has been and is currently manifested in media outlets such as films and television shows. The exploitation of black women in the media is related to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies because it analyzes the representations of a specific group of women in the media as well as the ways in which oppression of gender and race intersect. While dominant feminist rhetoric critiques the representations of women in the media, it does little to recognize the importance of the intersection of race and gender in our society. This paper will focus on the intersection of race and gender by employing Black Feminist Theory to analyze the representation of black women in the media.

Before we begin our analyses of contemporary representations of African American women in media, it is important to briefly recount the historical experiences of this group in order to trace the origins of these stereotypical representations. For their entire existence in the United States, black women have been subjected to marginalization based on the white-supremacist, male dominant cultural beliefs inherent in our society. These cultural beliefs, coupled with the colonial necessity of expansionism and domination, contributed to the development of slavery in the United States. Slavery is one of the most important social institutions that has shaped both the experiences and perceptions of black women in American society. Within their strictly controlled roles in this system of oppression, dominant stereotypes about African American women emerged. These stereotypes were used to evaluate and set the standard for black women’s behaviors. The two prominent stereotypes that came from slavery are the mammy and jezebel. The most recognizable stereotype of African American women is of the mammy, who was a slave that was responsible for caring for the owner’s children (Banks 2008). The mammy archetype represents the black woman as a content and loyal domestic servant who puts the needs of her owners’ family before her own. Opposite of the mammy is the jezebel, who is a hypersexualized image of the black woman. During this period, it was common for white, male owners to rape their female slaves. Black women came to be viewed as welcoming this sexual activity, which eventually led to the belief that all black women had a heightened and animalistic sexual appetite (Banks 2008). These stereotypes are reflective of the lack of agency that black women faced under the oppression of a racist and sexist institution. As African American women gained more agency throughout the 20th century, new stereotypes emerged. In contrast to the previous stereotypes, the new stereotypes criticized black women for having too much agency as opposed to none at all.

After the abolishment of slavery, African American women actively confronted the issue of inequality in American society. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, African American women such as Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker were instrumental in movements that sought to advance the predicament of black women in the US. When compared to previous stereotypes held about African American women, the actions of these women appeared to the dominant social group as overly aggressive and hostile. Thus, the image of the sapphire and the super woman were born. The sapphire characterized black women as angry, loud, controlling, confrontational, and emasculating (Sims 2006). In the home, she challenged the traditional role as a submissive wife and vigorously challenged her husband’s authority, while in public she challenged the existing social hierarchy that placed her at the bottom. This newfound strength was also caricatured in the super woman image, which portrayed black women as “rough and tough, yet sexy and caring” (Banks 79). In contrast to more traditional family dynamics, this image portrayed black women as being protectors of their families and the black community as a whole. Ironically, this reinforced the belief that black women were the cause of black men’s lack of power in society. Regardless of the characteristics ascribed to black women, they were always portrayed as negative. When black women were viewed as submissive, this was transformed into negative stereotypes that justified their degradation. This was not the case for white women during the same time period. The submissiveness of white women was seen as a positive attribute and was considered the feminine ideal. As black women gained their voices to obtain recognition, they were now considered to be aggressive. A new body of knowledge emerged, collectively referred to as Black Feminist Theory, to recognize the experiences of black women and to dispel these negative stereotypes.

During a time when marginalized groups, such as African Americans and women, were fighting for equality, black women felt that the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement did not represent their interests. Thus, the Black Feminist Theory is a body of knowledge that grew out of, and in response, to both movements. According to Black Feminist Theory, black women disproportionately experience oppression because they are the least protected by their social group (that is, race and gender status). The sentiment among black women at this time was that, ‘“black’ was equated with black men and ‘woman’ was equated with white women” (Collins 24). Thus, black female thinkers developed theory to adequately address the way in which race, gender, and class were interconnected in their lives. This analytical viewpoint employs an intersectional analysis, which is described as a “multilayered analysis of how multiple oppressions result in different experiences for different groups of women” (Luna 351). The experiences of black women are different in that they do not fit within the boundaries of traditional race and gender oppressions, so in order to fully understand their experiences, we must look at the intersection of racism and sexism (Crenshaw 1991). A core tenet of Black Feminist Theory is that the intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and sexuality could not be justified without the existence of negative stereotypes such as the mammy, jezebel, sapphire, and superwoman (Collins 2000). Furthermore, Patricia Hill Collins states that “these controlling images are designed [by the dominant social group] to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life” (Collins 69). This is reflective of black women’s status in the social hierarchy and is created and maintained by images throughout popular culture. Media has the power to influence and shape of cultural myths about an ethnic group, and in this way, the representation of African American women in the media can be viewed as “a valid historical document reflecting predominant attitudes, conscious or unconscious, in American culture” (Sims 2006). For this analysis, we are critiquing two contemporary films and a performance from the annual MTV Video Music Awards show. These examples illustrate 1) the survival of these negative stereotypes over time, 2) their widespread usage throughout media, and 3) the acceptance of these stereotypes as valid.

Scary Movie is a horror-comedy spoof film that parodies several late 1990’s films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Sixth Sense. I chose to analyze this film for two reasons. First, Scary Movie was one of the highest grossing films in 2000. In fact, Dimension Films heavily stressed to the public that they would not produce a sequel to the film, but due to the film’s immense popularity, they released four sequels. Additionally, the cast is primarily white, featuring only one African American actress. This is important for my analysis because the film discretely sends a message about how African American women interact with white people.

The scene I will analyze takes place in a crowded movie theater. Brenda (the African American actress) is on a date with her boyfriend to see a Shakespeare film, and they are the only African Americans in attendance. Brenda’s boyfriend goes to the restroom, leaving Brenda alone for a few minutes. As soon as she is alone, she whips out some fried chicken that is wrapped in aluminum foil and a bottle of hot sauce. She begins eating her snack, all the while loudly commenting on the film. Around her, the moviegoers are growing angry because of her rowdy and obnoxious behavior. Eventually, one of the moviegoers grows tired of her loudness and tells her to shut up. Brenda begins to scream at the man even more loudly and even extends her insults to those who did not confront her. Throughout this scene, she is rolling her eyes and her neck, putting her hands in people’s faces, and displays an extremely bitter and negative attitude. The confrontation ends when Brenda believes her boyfriend has returned from the bathroom. In actuality, it is the serial killer that has been haunting the town for weeks. As the serial killer is taking his knife out to kill Brenda, a moviegoer takes the knife from him and stabs Brenda himself. Everyone in the theater gets in on the action, taking turns stabbing, beating, or kicking her. Brenda staggers to the platform directly in front of the screen and collapses. The theater erupts in applause in celebration of her death, and the moviegoers continue to watch the film as if nothing happened.

When I first saw the film, I thought it was hilarious! But after taking this course, I have developed a feminist perspective that is hard to overcome. Now, watching this film is deeply troubling for me. The first thing that is problematic in this scene is the fact that she is eating fried chicken and hot sauce. One of the most static stereotypes about black people in general is that they enjoy this particular food, and this scene is playing on this belief in a comedic way. Also, Brenda’s character is the epitome of the sapphire image. The sapphire has been historically portrayed as a woman who is  “tart-tongued”, one who often “violently and rhythmically rocks her head” when speaking, and who flies through “irrational states of anger” (Sims 32). This description of the sapphire recounts Brenda’s character in this scene almost flawlessly. Brenda irrationally gets upset with the other patrons in the theater due to her tart tongue and dramatically rolls her neck and eyes throughout the argument. She has an extremely bitter attitude for no logical reason. Additionally, Brenda’s demeanor is in direct opposition to the European ideal of a docile, submissive woman. This masculinizes Brenda, and in a sense, black women as a whole and portrays them as extremely volatile and confrontational. As a result of these depictions, black women are then viewed as masculine, and therefore, undeserving of affection from men. Furthermore, Brenda’s abrasive character makes the consumer feel sympathetic to her boyfriend because he is charged with the difficult task of putting up with Brenda’s confrontational attitude. This further suggests that black women are viewed as undesirable to both white and black men.  This masculinization of black women can also serve to justify their subjugation in society.

Sapphires, and specifically Brenda in this scene, are notoriously hard to get along with, and this is illustrated by the fact that she engages in a heated argument with an entire theater of patrons. This sends the subliminal message to consumers that African American women are confrontational, bitchy, and hard to deal with. This message is further ingrained when the moviegoers murder Brenda because they are only able to achieve peace when the obnoxious black woman is killed. The murder itself suggests that the only viable solution to the problem of bitchy black women is to permanently silence them. All other methods will only result in an increase in her rage.

Additionally, it is important to note that in this scene, Brenda is considered to deserve the violence that ends in her death due to her confrontational nature. The viewers grow to genuinely dislike her, so no one minds that she is brutally murdered in the theater. In fact, her murder calls for celebration! This sort of justification has been and is currently widely used in society in general. Because of black women’s particular characteristics, the dominant social group has a perfectly sound justification for subjecting this group to violence and oppression.

The second film I will analyze is Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman. I chose this film because it, like the previous film I discussed, was immensely popular and was one of the top grossing films of 2005. The main character, Madea, was so popular that she is the star of seven sequels that collectively make up the “Madea” film franchise. For the purposes of this analysis, we will focus on the representation of the mammy archetype through Madea’s character in Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

The film centers on the struggles of a woman, Helen, who is going through a particularly ugly divorce. After her husband violently throws her out of their home, she goes to Madea’s house for safety. When Helen arrives, it is very late in the night, and she catches Madea by surprise. Madea kicks the door open, yielding a loaded pistol. Once everything is straightened out, Madea welcomes Helen into her home and invites her to stay overnight. When Helen enters the home, Madea’s brother calls out “Who that is knockin’ on the door this late?”. Madea tells him not to worry about it and to go back to sleep. However, her brother presses further, telling her “I’m serious! I’m putting my foot down!”, to which she replies “Kunta Kinte put his foot down and it got chopped off. Now take yo ass to bed!”.  The next morning, Helen enters the kitchen and runs into Deborah, a methamphetamine addict whom Madea looks after. Madea is busily bustling around the kitchen to prepare breakfast, all the while her breasts and butt are exaggeratedly swinging around. After Deborah leaves, Helen asks Madea why she is taking care of her. Madea tells Helen that she feels an obligation to look after people and that it’s a part of her nature.

There are several problematic issues with Madea’s character in this film. First and perhaps most problematic, her character is played by Tyler Perry dressed in drag. Therefore, Madea has subtle, masculine qualities that arise from the fact that it is a man dressed in drag. For example, she hovers over all the women (and some men) in the film, has rough hands, broad shoulders, and a deep voice. Additionally, Madea is a heavy-set woman with extremely large breasts and a large backside. Combined, these characteristics form what bell hooks refers to a “masculinized sub-human characteristics” (hooks 1996). The mammy’s voluptuous body was in stark contrast to the thin, often corseted frame of white women at the time of the inception of this archetype. This masculinization of the mammy image was used to maintain the white supremacist and patriarchal idea that white women represented the femininity in its purest form (Collins 2000). Thus, the mammy’s large frame represents the antithesis of the American conception of beauty, femininity, and womanhood.

Additionally, Madea’s speech pattern reveals a “bossy, domineering, and uneducated character”, which is consistent with the historical mammy archetype (Sims 2006). Throughout the previous scene I described, Madea says “chillins” instead of “children” , “yo” instead of “your”, and generally does not speak proper English. This serves to show that African American women are uneducated and provides justification for keeping them on the periphery of society and denying them certain privileges. Furthermore, Madea demonstrates a domineering and abrasive nature when she answers the door and almost shoots her granddaughter. Immediately following that, she emasculates her brother when he attempts to exert power over her. Her attitude demonstrates that black women are in stark opposition to the docile and submissive feminine ideal that is perpetuated in society. The mammy’s placement at the periphery of society indicates that she is deemed to be of a lesser status that the dominant social group.

Lastly, Madea is the caretaker of the community and does this by feeding people and giving them a place to stay. The scene I previously described is pretty typical of her actions throughout the film; her life seems to revolve around domestic work. One of the most salient characteristics of the mammy archetype is that she is content and happy carrying out the domestic needs of the family that she works for (Collins 2000). In this way, African American women were viewed as only suitable for domestic work and have been historically shutout from other career paths. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn stresses in her essay, "Women and Labor Migration", women of European descent did not have to work outside the home because their husbands earned enough that this was not necessary. Ethnic families did not enjoy the same luxuries, and thus, ethnic women needed to secure work outside of the home. The only positions that were available to them were domestic work, and their concentration in this field “reinforced their degraded status in society” (Glenn). Domestic work became “more or less synonymous badges of inferiority” (Glenn). In conclusion, Madea’s statement that it is “in her nature” to care for people perpetuates the idea that black women are only suitable for careers in the domestic sphere. Thus, the stereotype that African American women are unworthy of employment outside of the household is perpetuated by Madea’s uneducated speech pattern and by the fact that she is content with doing housework.

What is to be said about the fact that both films are comedies? Would these comedies have been so successful if the black actresses were white? I believe that part of the success of both the films stems from the fact that an African American woman is the source of the comedy. African American womanhood has been the source of public ridicule and humiliation for decades. Both of these films propagate ideas about the inferiority of black womanhood to traditional femininity. Additionally, both Brenda and (especially) Madea exhibit speech patterns that suggest that the women are uneducated. Due to this publicly accepted mockery of black womanhood and intelligence, therein lies the justification for the oppression and subjugation of this group.

Aside from films, television is another source of media that is used to reflect the public exploitation and negative portrayal of black women in society. From her backup dancers to her sexual gestures and attire, Miley Cyrus’ recent performance in the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA’s) is a prime example of how popular culture on television shows can create and maintain black women’s social status and oppression. At the start of her performance, Miley appears dressed in a skimpy teddy bear one-piece, which she later takes off to reveal a tight nude bikini. Two pigtail buns and continuous dramatic exposures of her tongue finish off her childish yet scanty look. As she starts dancing and “twerking out” to the introduction music, the stage is set with a big robotic teddy bear and she is accompanied by backup dancers dressed also as teddy bears who, interestingly, all happen to be black voluptuous women. Throughout the performance, she is seen making sexual gestures to not only her body, but the bodies of others. In one shot of her performance, the camera captures her shaking her face in and slapping the exposed fleshy butt of one of her backup dancers whose face is covered with a teddy bear mask. As her performance transitions into a collaboration with Robin Thicke, she is seen wearing a foam hand which she uses as a sexual prop to fondle his body and her own. Despite him being twenty years her senior, she continues to grind on him and makes sexual facial expressions and bodily gestures.  

Following this highly publicized event, many critics accused Miley Cyrus of “slut-shaming”, a term used to admonish women whose behaviors seem more sexual than what is socially acceptable. Because everything about her VMA performance was so drastically different from her former innocent Hannah Montana days, people were quick to point out her newfound promiscuity and sexuality, which was evident in her costume and dance. Few, however, pointed out the racial implications from her performance. Interestingly enough, it was rumored that in the making of her new album, Miley Cyrus had actually requested music that sounded “black”. If this was the case, then it seems like her VMA performance was a reflection of what she narrowly thought best represented the epitome of black music and culture. Thus, it may not be her own sexuality, but rather, the hypersexuality and objectification of black women that is being exposed through her performance.

Throughout history, hypersexuality and objectification have been negatively attributed to and used against black women. According to Black Feminist Theorists, the emergence and prevalence of the jezebel image has been used to justify both of these concepts in which black women are seen as animalistic in their increased sexual appetites and thus seen as objects to satiate white man’s sexual desires (Banks 2008). In this specific example regarding Miley Cyrus’s VMA performance, from a Black Feminist Theoretical lens, it can be said that the hypersexuality of black women is presented in the dramatization of Miley’s dancing. “Twerking”, a dance that involves a shaking of the hips and butt, was first introduced to American popular culture through songs and music videos by black artists. In fact, the act of “twerking” has also been compared to the dance of traditional Africans. By showing off her “twerking” skills on stage while surrounded by black women backup dancers, Miley demonstrates that she too can be black and sexual and ultimately be like a black woman. Her dance is an imitation of what she thinks all black women are supposed to be like and do. This reinforces Black Feminist Theory because as a part of the dominant social group (white), she is helping to construct and reinscribe not only a constricted view of black culture, but also the hypersexual image of black women and their bodies as the embodiment of sex and as sexually deviant (Collins 2000).

The objectification of her black backup dancers serves to further hypersexualize black women and negatively portrays them as jezebels. In choosing all black women backup dancers with noticeably voluptuous butts, it seems that Miley views their curves as a part of their black womanhood and their bodies as sexual objects. This supports the Black Feminist view that recognizes the commodification and exploitation of black women’s bodies as “markers of status” that place them low in the social hierarchy that relies on race and gender (Collins 2000). In addition, the sexually suggestive slaps and gestures towards one specific backup dancer, who is seen with her face covered in a teddy bear mask, demonstrates the devaluation black women’s bodies. The faceless body of that one backup dancer is not seen or respected as the body of a woman but instead is used as a prop for entertainment purposes. The way in which the backup dancer exposes her butt and lets Miley publicly slap and play with it, also promotes the idea that black women are hypersexual and that they “want” it. This view of all black women as jezebels who “want it” due to their supposed animalistic sexual appetite is the same view and justification that was held by white men who raped black women throughout slavery (Banks 2008). Thus, this very hypersexual and racist nature of this performance contributes to the oppression of black women by maintaining negative images.

Though there are numerous genres of television shows, I specifically chose to critique this example, a performance from the MTV Video Music Awards, for set reasons. First and foremost, MTV is a television channel that is geared towards the youth and teens. The annual Video Music Awards gives artists a chance to perform their music while also showcasing their contribution to the popular culture of that year. What is displayed on this show, like any other show, reinforces society’s ideals. Nevertheless, Miley Cyrus’s performance this year was especially representative of the survival of these negative stereotypes of black women over time. From the content and nature of her performance, it is evident that the jezebel image of black women is still ingrained in our popular culture and media and thought of as a form of entertainment. The widespread usage of these stereotypes throughout media is also very visible. Miley Cyrus’s performance was not the only one that contained negative stereotypes of black women. The performance that followed Miley’s, which included rappers 2 Chainz and Kendrick Lamar, also included primarily black women in skin tight clothing who were either dancing provocatively or holding up props. However, Miley’s performance was the one to be criticized and spread throughout other media outlets because it was the epitome of public exploitation of black women. As a white woman, she not only hypersexualized but racialized these black women, thus contributing to the negative oppressive connotation of her performance. Lastly, MTV’s most recent announcement selecting Miley Cyrus as the Best Artist of 2013 supports the acceptance of these stereotypes as valid. The fact is, despite what her performance entailed, her music is still widely popular and loved by many. Therefore, this mirrors the leniency and overall acceptance that many feel towards the oppression of black women.

In order to fully understand the power of these images, we must first unravel the definition of violence. The Oxford Dictionary defines violence as “the exercise of physical force as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property” (Collins 921). However, this definition glosses over the effect that power hierarchies have on what is defined as violence. According to Patricia Hill Collins, violence is not only committed on an individual-to-individual basis, but it is committed through social hierarchies on a group-to-group basis. Some forms of speech are designed to belittle and humiliate the victim, to communicate to them that they are worthless, and to demonstrate their subjugated “place” in the social hierarchy. Collins argues that physical violence needs a climate of fear and terror to operate, and this climate is created and maintained by verbal assaults. Thus, the definition of violence needs to be broadened to include speech and forms of institutional violence. For example, African American women fall victim to sexual assault, but due to the stereotype that black women are hypersexual, they are often not considered victims of violence (Collins 1998). In this case, the dominant group’s speech has contributed to the incidence of violence against African American women by creating the idea that they welcome acts of sexual aggression, yet, speech remains outside of traditional definitions of violence (Collins 1998). Once we adopt Collins’ redefined concept of violence, we are able to begin to unravel the effects of these images on the perception of black women in society.

            For some individuals, the only exposure they have to black women are those on the screen, so the images constructed by the media serve to demonstrate what “real” black women are. However, the “real” representation of black women has effectively been erased from history. In order for one group to dominate another, the subordinate group must be objectified to justify their domination. As bell hooks asserts, “as objects, one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity is created by others, one’s history is constructed [by those in power]”. The historical representation of African American women as jezebels, mammies, sapphires, and superwomen were created “not to reflect or represent a reality, but to function… [as an] objective of social relations” (Collins 70). These repeated, fictitious representations of black womanhood came to be and still is considered a valid history of black women in broader society. The intricate and complex history of African American women has been completely erased by the dominant group and replaced with images that further their agenda of domination. In order for us to prevent this pattern from spreading onto our future generations, more must be done. The emergence of Black Feminist Theory has addressed this interconnection between race and gender; yet, films, television shows, and other media outlets continue to display these negative portrayals. The immense popularity of these images is reflective of the fact that these stereotypes are deeply ingrained into and accepted by our culture. Though we do not know the exact measures it will take to rid society of these stereotypes, what we do know is that it’s going to include a complete transformation of our existing social structures to undo the effects of generations of oppression.

Works Cited

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