Changing Theoretical Perspectives on Women's Media Images: The Emergence of Patterns in a new Area of Historical Scholarship

Abstract

This interpretive, historiographic essay surveys the past twenty-five years of historical research on images of women in American mass media, a growing field of inquiry in communication history. It places this work into four categories of scholarship - the stereotypes approach, the search for alternative images, the examination of imagery as ideology, and the “reading” of images as polysemic texts - that provide a temporal framework for discussing the trajectory of critical perspectives on the subject. It argues that significant patterns have already emerged in this relatively new area, and that these trends illustrate larger issues in historical research. Indeed, the range of content revealed by this survey is less significant than the array of theoretical models that, when considered together, point to important concerns underlying all media history scholarship: how we define our mission as scholars, what counts as historical evidence, and who controls the meaning of mass-media imagery.