Chapter Six: Representation
By now we have established that images are a lot more complex than we tend to give them credit for, even (or especially) when they seem simple. They reveal our own interests and prejudices; we imbue them with an atmospheric aura, made up of their history and intentions; they hide their politics behind beauty; they have secret codes that contradict what they seem to be saying; the way they are consumed can change the course of history; the ability to describe them enables the ability to analyze them; analyzing them can protect you from them and allow you to use them for your own purposes.
In a time when images are everywhere – we scroll through them for hours a day, we watch them tell stories for hours more, and in New York you are statistically more likely to see an ad when you look outside than not – it has become a common opinion that who is in those images is an incredibly important question. From who is cast in films and television shows to who is modelling in the ads on the sides of buses to who is selling the soda on the billboard to which influencer is getting paid the most for product placements, there is no sphere of the media and advertising complex that hasn’t had a degree of activism and discussion about the big question of who: who is being included in our “image world” – and who isn’t.
One might argue that the “image world” we occupy is a reflection of our society. The disparity between the number of white actors and models – and how much they are paid – and the number of people of color in those professions is an accurate representation of the overall unfairness and discrimination in our society, and simply reflects those problems. In the past, we might have expected people to focus on reducing discrimination across society and then to wait for film and television and advertising to reflect that progress, rather than focusing on how things look in the media. For instance, as women fought to get better jobs and fairer pay to some degree of success, we might have expected that to have been reflected in the content of the TV shows we watched and in the way they were made, as a natural extension of the progress being made in the world.
But often that wasn’t the case. Even as discrimination in the contemporary workplace was (only partially) diminished over the past fifty years, films and television didn’t reflect that in either pay, casting, or production roles. In 2019, women comprised about 13% of the directors of the top 250 movies of that year. The same year, people of color comprised around 20% of television serial lead characters, though people of color represented around 40% of the population. So while there have long been people arguing for better representation of marginalized groups in the media, the new and mainstream focus on diversity initiatives suggests a change of tack from hoping that the media will reflect society’s changes to making it produce the change by representing the world closer to how it should be.
This is an interesting phenomenon because what it tells us is that people are recognizing that the content of our “image culture” has the power to change society and the economy itself. Culture is mirrored by society as much as it reflects society. Life imitates art. Aside from being important battlegrounds in themselves, studying the nature of these battles tells us a lot about how people feel about the role of images in the twenty-first century, including the similarities and differences in how images function under capitalism rather than fascism.
Some Categories of Representation
Some of the major contemporary battlegrounds of representation are discussed and summarized below. When you take in contemporary culture, try to spot not just which of these aspects of representation are done poorly (stereotypical depictions, for instance) but also which are absent: who’s missing in your favorite show?
Race: This extends not only from the employment of people of color in the media industry, but also to how well they are paid compared to their white counterparts, how long they are on screen, and whether their characters are well-developed or if they fall into offensive or repetitive stereotypes. The hiring of white directors and writers continues to be unrepresentative and often leads to television and films with poor racial literacy.
Gender: That women are underrepresented and underpaid in the media, especially film and television, is well-documented. They too can be represented in stereotypical ways – often in concurrence or “intersection” with race – and/or be used as sexual props in ads and drama alike. The rights of trans and non-binary people to be represented accurately and complexly have been more prominently asserted in the last ten years, though transphobic material still often gets through the filters. For each of these groups, the right to have non-abusive workplaces in these industries has been a great struggle throughout their history and continues to this day, as demonstrated in part by the #MeToo movement.
Sexuality: The question of fair representation for gay, lesbian, and queer actors, writers, performers, directors, and media creators is very much one of visibility. While queer artists have had creative roles for a long time in the media industry, the question of both if, how, and when queer people could be portrayed or marketed on screen and in media remains a fraught one. While undoubtedly we have continued advancing from Dawson’s Creek in 2000, which included one of the first ever gay kisses ever shown on television, into a time when shows about the sex lives of trans people can be mainstream television (Transparent), the battleground of adequate queer representation on and off screen remains a difficult one for creators to navigate successfully.
Class: An often-overlooked aspect of representation is the representation of economic and social class. It is often an intersectional question that follows from successes in other arenas: for instance, black people may be getting more roles, but are the only stories being told about upper middle-class black people? Why are working class black people not deemed worthy of representation in stories about their lives? But these questions don’t always follow from another category: a problematic class stereotype might be a show that depicts white Southern poor people as ignorant, violent “trailer trash”. This is an example of class discrimination that uses stereotypes about class to diminish the characters and the overall representation of working-class people in general (though it’s not related to any kind of racism: there’s no such thing as racism towards white people, as the term “racism” describes a power-structure that privileges white people).
Age: As the Western world has an ageing population due to low birth rates, longer life expectancies, and diminished immigration, we will begin to see more and more focus on advertising and media directed towards the older portions of our population, driven largely by it becoming an increasingly lucrative demographic. This movement is mirrored in labor law and disputes about “age discrimination” and ageism, so as legal protections against discrimination based on age in the workplace develop, so they will in the media. This is a good reminder of one of the key principles of representation in the mainstream media: It only gets changed when it’s bad business not to.
Body Type: Also often intersectional with race as well as with gender, the question of the kinds of body type that get represented in modelling, advertising, television, and film is another question of visibility. This began as a complaint about the exaggerated presence of very thin and thin-framed (usually white) models in ads and magazines throughout the 20th century, and developed into a call for body types to be represented across the spectrum of shapes, races, sizes, and disabilities. This is an interesting moment, because it evidences how deep our relationship to the media goes: many feel they need to see themselves represented in mass media in order to feel their place in society is “validated” in some way. This makes it slightly different to some of the other questions of representation, as body-type is less an identity category that needs to be enfranchised or represented and more a demand for the media to accurately reflect back to us the reality of people’s bodies.
It is a striking factor that advertising is such a key part of the questions of representation as it may not have been that way fifty or even twenty years ago, when the fight might well have been for fewer rather than better ads. It evidences a generational advancement in visual literacy - the ability to critically describe and analyze the content of images – but also a generational decision to critically approach the images we are given and told represent our culture. The less hopeful aspect of this change is that we have accepted the constant barrage of the media; the most hopeful aspect of that decision is that it suggests that we want it to change. The following chapter will bring the discussion to one of the biggest changes of all in our image environment: the internet.