The phrase ‘engendering the media’ is, in some circles, a way of describing the need to address gender equity targets in the professional arena. While this definition is vital to encourage and ensure equal opportunities for women who pursue careers as journalists, reporters and photographers, it is too narrow as all it does is assess the participation of women in the production of media.
A more totalising definition and approach to engendering the media is necessary; one which addresses the representation of women in the media, which offers an ideological viewpoint from a women’s perspective and realigns the agency of women in the production of news.
Nevertheless, the first step towards achieving a more holistic approach is still to ensure that more women are actively involved in the newsroom. The annual general conference of the South African National Editor’s Forum (SANEF) held in Durban recently (27-29 June 2003) raised the issue of increasing gender equity quotas as a matter of urgency, alongside ensuring that women are recognised for their contribution in the field.
Debbie Yazbek, photojournalist for The Star and this year’s winner of the Nat Nakasa Award, is a testament to the acknowledgment women are beginning to receive. But changing the mindset of reporting and bringing gender sensitivity to the representation of women in the media offers a radical shift for both men and women in the profession. And being a woman is not necessarily automatic qualification for producing gender sensitive news, or for providing alternative forms of representation around women.
The normative model in training institutions is masculine and patriarchal, and when women enter as trainees in the workspace they are often met with macho attitudes and chauvinism. Why would we expect anything less in what is still a male dominated profession?
Female journalists are very rarely encouraged to explore stories from a woman’s perspective (even though news items are concerned with events in which women are victimised), nor are there adequate opportunities to challenge the dominant and prevailing modes of representing women in news stories or photography.
In schooling women in the practice of media production, a women’s ability to emulate and replicate a masculine style and sensibility is a sure marker towards her success in the professional world. An aptitude for dissolving one’s gender bodes for professional achievement and upward mobility. The situation for women in media is analogous to that of women in bureaucracies.
Patricia MacFadden, Zimbabwean activist and feminist, offers an astute observation about women in parliament. ‘Femocrats’, as she terms them, frequently assume patriarchal, macho socio-political attitudes in order to maintain party favour and continued support. Often the policies femocrats initiate and champion offer little consideration for the marginalisation experienced by economically disenfranchised women (the reality for the majority of women on this continent). As MacFadden shows, the longevity and vitality of a femocrat’s career is her ability to conform, offer as little resistance to the political status quo as possible, and campaign on behalf of her male peers where female representation serves a strategic political agenda.
In South Africa the situation is not dissimilar. Femocrats have represented certain pivotal policy issues implicating women most severely. Many strategic posts have been given to women, and yet strategies and policy outcomes augur little empathy for the socio-economic plight of impoverished women.
For women in media, media professionals, seizing the opportunity of equity targets is not simply about employment prospects, but an invaluable occasion for reshaping the representation of women in media. For women in media it is an occasion to deal with women in power, the experiences of women in varied socio-economic circumstances, and the means to redefining prevailing media discourse around women.
An obvious, but by no means exhaustive, exemplification is the role of the media in shaping public perception of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Desiree Lewis in an article ‘No Conventional Role Model’ reproduced in the Mail & Guardian (19 June 2003) observes that it is not the woman herself that inspires inquiry, but ‘how she has been talked about – the extreme idealisation and vilification.”
It is Madikizela-Mandela’s constant political evolution in relation to the state that has rendered her the most volatile femocrat. Under apartheid she served to challenge the state apparatus and, in a democratic South Africa, she remains unswayed by party politics and party loyalties. Her refusal to dissolve her individuality and identity as a woman into a party line makes it virtually impossible for any media to contain a coherent understanding of her. Rather than attempt to understand the political and personal complexities that have shaped Madikizela-Mandela’s public persona, the media have consistently represented her in a way that has fulfilled their political agenda and imaginary.
Madikizela-Mandela was constructed as the ‘Mother of the Nation’ during apartheid because a resistance struggle had been born and needed nurturing. The ideal of her as a tempered woman in waiting without sexual desire (our Penelope awaiting her Odysseus) was a masculine construction in the media. It is a patriarchal media that imagines women as compliant, regulated and tempered.
Lewis’s article offers an implicit challenge for ensuring that the project of engendering the media is not one of women as media professionals singularly, but that the representation of women in the media is evocative of its social construction. Securing professional options for women in the media remains only a fraction of a larger engendering objective. The media has to be held accountable for gender sensitivity and gender representations that are diverse and democratic.
Dr. Jyoti Mistry is Head of Television in the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has worked as a filmmaker in New York and Vienna and holds a Ph.D in Cinema Studies from New York University.