Hip Hop and Race Portrayal in News Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Hip Hop and Race Portrayal in News - Essay Example The paper "Hip Hop and Race Portrayal in News" analyzes gender portrayal in hip hop and race portrayal in news. Hegemony in gender usually follows a pattern in which men indirectly dominate women in society. Through discourses perpetrated through various ways especially in the media, such positions appear ingrained in the society and unquestionable. Douglas explores the issue of hegemony arguing that there is meaning, context and representation of various sociological aspects with most of these being used to perpetrate hegemony. Dyer discusses the establishment of stereotypes in detail and explains that stereotypic images portrayed in media forms are widely believed and agreed upon as being right. As Douglas states, analysis of hegemony involves historical socio-cultural inquiries into how culture and various social institutions from the media have been used to facilitate domination on rather broad social and political ends. Thus, in order to determine whether the media’s powe r is increasing or decreasing, this discussion shall seek to establish hip hop’s perpetration of gender hegemony and the counter-efforts to break these hegemonic discourses based on a time series analysis. The hip hop genre is known to perpetrate gender hegemony and misogyny and has, in fact, come under heavy criticism for this in the past. Perpetration of gender hegemony in hip hop involves using lyrics and videos to portray women as sex objects, trivializing them, marginalizing them and using derogative terms to refer to them.