Judgment of Gender
Media scholar Allison Butler talks with Steve about her book, Judgment of Gender: How Women are Centered and Silenced in Pop Culture.
Media scholar Allison Butler talks to Steve about her book, Judgment of Gender, exposing how patriarchal power and capitalist media institutions weaponize pop culture and construct narratives that fixate on appearance, personality, and scandal while obscuring questions of class and power. The conversation reveals a core dialectical contradiction: women are centered in media only to be silenced. Their personhood is reduced to superficial tropes.
The critiques of political candidates Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and even Nikki Haley, focus on pantsuits, headbands, voice, and age instead of their actual policies, their service to capital, and their imperialist actions (hello? Clinton’s role in Libya? “We came, we saw, he died.”) The media’s obsession with superficiality silences substantive class-based critique.
Allison highlights the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. This is critical. It is not a fringe issue but a stark example of state-sanctioned violence and the super-exploitation of the most oppressed. That the legacy media’s silence on this horror renders these lives invisible is a feature, not a bug, of a system that treats Indigenous lives as disposable.
Allison Butler is a Senior Lecturer, Associate Chair, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She serves as Vice President on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy, and she is a co-author of multiple practical resources for media literacy education.
IG: @atbutler5
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-butler-190882108/
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Gender is a difficult topic for Marxists because the ruling class has become so good at using identity politics to fragment us and redirect political struggle into culture wars. But we can't ignore that there are very real ways capitalism exploits people differently. A dialectical and historical materialist approach helps us see this. Women's oppression, racial oppression, and national oppression are not distractions. They're part of the social & economic relations that capitalism manipulates and uses. We need to understand them within the complex totality rather than substitutes for class analysis.
its impossible to address individually, abuse and exploitation that is caused socially