Multicultural U.S. Society and the Media : A Review of Research on Race and Gender(Multicultural Society and Media Communication)

Abstract

The objective of this study is to review previous research on the role of the media in multicultural U.S. society and to characterize the research tradition. The study particularly focuses on arguments about the representation of race and gender. First, previous studies on ethnic minority media and mainstream media in the U.S. are reviewed. Ethnic minority media has remained an important research subject since Robert Park's immigrant press study, but previous studies overwhelmingly focused on majority media. Many researchers have in particular explored the representation of "race" in Hollywood films, television programs, and advertisements by using quantitative content analysis methods as well as qualitative textual/discourse analysis methods. Second, previous studies on the representations of "Asians," "Japanese Americans," and "the Japanese" are reviewed. Mainly due to efforts by Asian American researchers, empirical studies on the representation of Asians began to increase in the 1980s. These studies showed that the representations of Japanese Americans and Japanese people have been constructed and reconstructed as a part of the popular images of the "yellow peril" and the "model minority," which were constructed to represent Asians and Asian Americans. At that time, media researchers also began to explore the "interlocking system" of "race" and "gender," as it became a critical issue in feminist studies. Under the influences of cultural pluralism/multiculturalism, feminism, and postmodernism, media researchers in the U.S. came to explore more racial categories, such as Blacks as well as Asians and Hispanics, more gender categories, such as men as well as women, and wider contexts, such as images and texts as well as dynamic processes between cultural production and representation. In other words, their research perspectives have become pluralized and diverse.