Media, culture and diversity
Seminar 1: Introduction
This class: how identity and diversity are dealt with, produced, represented, regulated, consumed
and constructed in and through popular media culture
4 examples of what we will talk about in the course
Election of Miss Belgium 2018
• Angeline Flor Pua
• Made the news: Chinese-Filipino diasporic background → first time we
had a miss Belgium winner with a non-white background
• Backlash on Twitter → “does not look Belgian”
• Othering and degrading her
• Racism and digital media:
o Speed
o globalization/international debate
• Blunt racism, sexism and homophobia: no longer publicly condoned →
social media is doing smth new to racism and sexism → also a
counterreaction → explicit expressions of racism or sexism will be
called out for, they will be challenged
• But what about structural sexism?
• Models as commodities?
• Angeline herself reacted
against the criticisms, found the
notion of agency really important →
women should be able to choose for
themselves
1
,City of Ghent Promotion Campaign (launched November 2017, image:
Jeroen Van Zwol)
• Homophobic and sexual violence → issues were being reported to the
city of Ghent & they felt that they had to do something
• Challenge structural racism
• Inclusivity without assimilation → wanted to share the message of
inclusivity throughout the city → image should represent different
identities → everyone is different but we all live at the same place
o Assimilation → some values and norms are seen as the right way
of doing or thinking about things
o Inclusivity = challenging the hierarchy
• Use of exaggerations = problematic? → isn’t this a bit stereotypical? →
everyone is being exaggerated, not that you feel like the creator is
mocking → more architypes
• Romani population? → why are they not represented in here? → there
are limits of representation of diversity
• Effectivity of such campaigns? → image would be seen as a utopia → images are needed to be
seen as an ideal, but images are not just enough → is it just window shopping? → are there real
actions undertaken to make sure that there will be more diversity
See You in the Next Live – AB Concerts promotional campaign
• Ancienne Belgique – concert hall (Brussels)
• Currently closed due to Covid-19
• Benoît Do Quang (videographer and artist), Ayco Duyster (radio host), Grâce Kamashi (bar
manager), DVTCH NORRIS (rap), Blu Samu (hip hop/rap)
• Main theme: looking forward to live music
• “Next “Live” will be diverse and inclusive
• Window-dressing?
A closer look…
• … at BOEF
• Sofiane Boussaadia
• Dutch rapper (°1993), Algerian parents
• Musical bio:
Debut performance in 2015;
2016: EP ‘Gewoon Boef’ (Zonamo Underground);
2017: Slaaptekort (BoefMusic); 2019: EP
’93’(Trifecta); Allemaal een Droom (Boef)
• Personal life: rocky road
• Popular artist! (+/-1.332.000 listeners/month on
Spotify)
A reconstruction of what happened:
• Car trouble on NYE 2017
• Snapchat: “Picked up by three kechs. My life is a movie. Happy New Year. I’m buying a boat this
year, just you wait”
2
,• First ‘wave’ of criticism: use of word ‘kech’ → kech = sex worker in
Arabic
• BOEF uploads another video: “I succeeded in upsetting a few people
because I said ‘kech’, but what are you doing in a club with alcohol,
with short skirts at eight o’clock in the morning, with boys? What are
you doing? You’re just a kech”
• Underscoring image of ‘superior’ masculinity
o commercial logics of an artist persona
o sociocultural role of the artist!
• Second wave of criticism: heated, mediated, and polarized
• BOEF issues an apology later that day
Analysis of the responses/practices:
• Denouncing: women, feminist scholars, fellow rappers
→ exposing ‘structural sexism’
• Support: online and offline, manager
→ asking for nuance, importance of youth culture, ‘slang’
• Parody: ordinary citizens, satire blogs
→ Using humor to voice criticism
• Boycott: spokespersons with symbolic capital
→ refusals by radio DJs to play songs, removal of festival line-ups,
ending professional collaborations…
• Setting up (mediated) debates
→ putting things into perspective
• #MeToo as context
→ spontaneous, uncontrolled digital movement that
denounces sexism in all its forms
→ singling out individuals, not always addressing
structural issues
• Ethnic identity and double standards
→ Sunny Bergman and Selma Omari: fighting sexism
with racism
→ everyday and structural racism, homophobia,
ignoring sexism by white persons
→ racial slur, framing it as Islam-related, using BOEF to
boycott R&B and hip hop…
• BOEF’s ‘final’ response:
o new song and video (‘Antwoord’)
o live performance and apology
• “We rappers are saying ‘bitches’ and so on, but we really don’t think less of women”
Course setup
• Course: gaining insight into
+ how popular (media) culture deals with diversity
+ the role of popular (media) culture in making sense of the world
• Approach:
3
, o To offer historical perspectives, contexts and milestones in the history of engaging with
sociocultural diversity in popular media culture.
o To provide key theoretical insights from media, communication, and cultural studies and
social theory to help us make sense of the various modes identities have been
represented in popular media culture.
o To offer reflections on contemporary trends, transformations and challenges that have
emerged in late modern societies.
Concrete objectives
1. Describe, explain and reflect on the key concepts, important theories, and historical and
contemporary debates prevailing in the research on media, culture and diversity.
2. Apply key concepts onto historical and contemporary phenomena that relate to media, culture
and diversity in order to make a scholarly sound and informed judgment and evaluation of these
phenomena.
3. Argue what the relevance is of media, communication and cultural studies for the analysis of
contemporary problems and demonstrate the sociocultural role and responsibility of a media
and communication scholar.
4. Being able to successfully conduct a small research project on diversity and popular (media)
culture in a group
5. Being able to clearly and concisely communicate a research project on diversity and popular
(media) culture to fellow students
Limitation
Focus on Western popular media culture:
• Program-related reasons
• Paradigmatic reasons
• Practical reasons
• Unfamiliar with cases? Watch-and-listen list (at end of PPT)
Seminar 2: identity, diversity and popular culture: key concepts
Introduction
• Assigning sex at birth → awareness of gender identity → they already define you, assign you a
sex → sex characteristics are used to base your gender identity on → people assume that
because of your sex you will also like the things that we associate with that sex → but it is
possible that your gender is not the same as your sex
• Awareness of ‘racial’, ethnic or diasporic background
o ‘racial’ → physical features that are used to categorize people in the sense of their race
• Awareness of sexual desires
• Embodied traits and sociocultural features become a basis for identity → traits are used to
categorize you and create in- and outgroups
• Labeling and creating in- and outgroups → using identity labels
Use particular identity-related features to know the other:
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