Representation, Identity and Ideology
Scope of this domain
Representation questions ask how media construct identities and whose values appear as normal. You need to analyse gender, ethnicity, age, disability, class, sexuality and national identity, and connect them to ideology.
Core concepts
- Representation is re-presentation: selection and construction, never a neutral mirror. What is left out matters as much as what is shown - symbolic annihilation (Tuchman) describes the absence or trivialisation of groups.
- Stereotype: a simplified, widely shared generalisation. Tessa Perkins argued stereotypes are not always negative, always false, or always about the powerless; they can be partly true yet still reduce complexity and resist change.
- Countertype: a deliberate reversal (the female action hero), which can nonetheless be absorbed back into the old stereotype.
- Ideology: a system of values and assumptions presented as common sense. Hegemony (Gramsci) explains how dominant ideas win consent; myth (Barthes) is how history becomes nature.
- Intersectionality (Crenshaw): identities combine, so a working-class woman of colour occupies a different representational position from a middle-class white woman.
- Context: Maltese media operate bilingually in a small market, so nationality, religion and migration are contested representational ground.
Worked example
A drama casts a wheelchair user solely to deliver one inspirational line. The character functions as a token, reduced to the disability (the 'brave sufferer' stereotype), with no interiority or storyline. Stronger analysis names the narrative function, the absence of disabled writers or performers, and the effect on audiences who rarely see disabled characters as ordinary or flawed.
Traps
- Judging representations only as 'positive' or 'negative'.
- Assuming texts simply reflect reality.
- Ignoring audience readings and production context.
- Listing stereotypes without naming their function or effect.