On The Relationships Between Mass Media And The Framework Of Women's Subjectivity Consciousness

With the development of scientific technology, we have experienced information revolutions as well as continual innovations of information media, the aggregation of which composes mass media. The chief cultural function of modern media is to constitute 'social knowledge' and 'social influence'. We savor the real life once we lived by giving insights into the world through the knowledge and image contributed by media. As part of national superstructure, mass media not only reproduces the situation and status of social gender, reflects social value orientation and ideology, but also participates in the course of the construction of social gender. However, viewing from the sexual perspective the description of female images and behaviors in the media, we will find it obviously stiff and not tallying with the facts. This thesis is to discuss the existence and the cause of such sexual discrimination in mass media, as well as how the occurrence frequencies of female images, the depictive approaches to them, the choices of subject matters and the points of view invisibly set up mortal and social notions and behaviors. It is also to analyze the intentional or unintentional influence of mass media makers' social gender consciousness on intensifying the stereotype and arranging the agenda setting. Interview method, documentary method, observation method and questionnaire method will be adopted in order to figure out the sticking point of the problem and to give feasible suggestions. The author deems that mass media is supposed to strengthen its responsibility and action . What's more, social macro-surroundings should embed the conception of gender into the major theories and perform its duty of supervising mass media as well. Meanwhile, it's crucial that women become awake to their self – consciousness and enhance it. The originality of this thesis lies in the following two aspects: First, while foreign researches have been done on the sex discrimination in mass media, most of them fail to analyze the unique reflection or dig the root of sexism in China. And domestic studies dwell on qualitative description rather than pondering upon this problem from sociological angle. Instead, this thesis is to view the problem qualitatively and quantitatively from sociological as well as Communicational angle. Second, as a culture, mass media plays a critical role in the construction of public sexual awareness. This thesis is not only to reveal the fact that the producers of mass media consciously or unconsciously confound "Gender" and "Social Gender" by selectively publishing derogatory reports about females, but also to analyze the cause of such phenomena.