How Stereotypes are Reinforced

A collection of essays on a wide range of issues on women and media the book makes for an insightful reading and presents an interesting exposition of how media texts in both their fictional and non-fictional accounts are increasingly influenced by the often simultaneous but disconnected even opposed sets of forces including feminist influences and critiques globalization activism in cyberspace and issues pertaining to gender policy and gender justice.

The editors both professors in the Department of English Osmania University Hyderabad have managed to bring together a diverse spectrum of essays that address the issue of women in media texts as objects and subjects producers and as audiences cutting across media technologies ranging from television to films including the multi-million dollar advertisement industry and going on to the new media and the internet.

Ammu Josephs article though largely a discussion using the theoretical framework of a German media economist Manfred Kops provides a contemporary underpinning to some of these debates. A look at how media globalization transnationalization and concentration resulting from a lop-sided reliance on the market logic that diminishes diversity and plurality of media point to the need for a gender analysis of media globalization.