Customer Reviews

Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction

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There are dozens of books on popular culture and its relation to gender and identity issues out there, but this one is extraordinary: concise, up-to-date, and very readable. Mr Gauntlett wrote not only an introduction to the main theories of popular culture like Giddens, Foucault or queer theory - he illustrated all the discussed theoretical concepts with recent examples like movies, TV series, music, websites, and magazines.

If you are a student of media studies and always wanted to know how popular culture influences our lifestyles and our concepts of gender and identity - grab this book! It is well written and clearly structured with plenty of cross-references and suggestions for further reading. A unique feature is the accompanying website where additional material can be found.

I was very excited when I first read the synopsis and reviews for this book. I thought it would make a great text for my Gender and the Media course, because it uses up to date examples and covers a wide range of media forms. Although I am a psychologist, I want to teach my course from an interdisciplinary perspective and thought choosing a text from a different discipline would be the perfect way to give a more diverse perspective on how to approach the subject matter. Unfortunately, upon reading the book, it became clear that the author has contempt for how psychologists approach gender identity and media studies. Rather than incorporating the psychological literature with work from other disciplines to form a fuller understanding of the topic, the author implies that quantitative research on social phenomena is fruitless. Furthermore, he interjects derogating comments about psychological research throughout the text. I personally believe the best way to truly understand how media, gender, and identity intersect would be to draw from both quantitative and qualitative studies and recognize that incorporating different theoretical perspectives and methodologies strengthens an analysis. The author clearly does not share my opinion, and thus I think his book only serves to further isolate scholars who should be trying to work together.

This book is amazing. I was struggling to come to grips with Judith Butler (and Foucault). I tried to understand what Butler had written and found it too dense. I tried to read those who had interpreted her and found them even worse. Then I read Media, Gender, and Identity and the sections on Butler and Foucault (written in plain English). There followed a period of 'enlightenment'.