Chapters Discussion (Reflection)

In this discussion forum, I invite you to share any additional personal reflections, and more specifically thought provoking questions to pursue the discussion on these three chapters below.

Your goal is NOTto merely give back the theories covered in class; instead, you are expected to use your reflection as a way of putting theory into practice and/or connecting the classroom materials to your everyday life experience/reality.Please write one personal reflection only of no less than 250 words and no more than 300 words.

In chapter 10, Defrancisco and Palczewiski discussed religion as a gendered institution. The authors argued that religion influences how we gender/sex our bodies.

Among the various ways through which religion get gendered are: the false assumption that women are more religious than men, sexist assigned rigid gender roles, complementarians and egalitarians views in Christianity, muscular Christianity, oppressive practices such as homophobia and transphobia, etc.

Additionally, they discussed how religions are more than a source of violence, rather a source of resistance, hope, and struggle (e.g. The African-American community).

In chapter 11, Defrancisco and Palczewiski discussed media as a gendered institution. They argued that although commercial entertainment media and reality television are not real, they still have real effects on perceptions of gender/sex.

The authors demonstrated the power of media through notions such as culture industries and mass entertainment. They discussed in deep three main characteristics of media production/consumption: media hegemony, media polysemy, and media polyvalence.

They also explored different approaches to studying "gaze" in the media industry among which John Berger's theory of "Ways of seeing," Laura Mulvey's theory of the "Male Gaze" (scopophilia), and Bell hooks' theory of "the Oppositional gaze." Additionally, they discussed issues of representations of minorities in mainstream U.S. media in terms of who, how, and why.

Finally, the authors discuss the hypersexualization/objectification of women in the media and the debate on "Masculinity in crisis" in the U.S. They concluded the chapter with a systematic call on a critical consumption of media.

In the last chapter, Defrancisco and Palczewiski provided us a take away from studying communication and gender. They reiterated their caution against a Gender differences approach to the study of gender in communication as nonproductive because of its multiple drawbacks among which: reinforcing the gender/sex binary, reinforcing heteronormativity, misdescribing the world by dismissing intersectionality as well as the experiences of non-gender conforming people; and ignoring the impact of power and violence.

In contrast, they reemphasized the importance of using a critical gendered lens in order to recognize the drawbacks of the gender differences approach, embrace an oppositional gaze, and make interventions in the world at both the local and global levels.

Additionally, they emphasized the importance of gender diversity in the study of gender in communication in order to promote social change.