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Article Excerpt
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MEDIA as an arbiter of social experience is well recognized. The media--newspapers, television, radio and, more recently, the Internet--educate, inform and entertain, all the while reflecting and refracting images and understandings of our social worlds with varying accuracy and truth. This paper compares media portrayals of people who work in the sex industry with these workers' self-reports of their personal backgrounds and experiences of what they do for a living. Our aim is to first, gauge the empirical distance between media depictions and workers' lived reality, and second, to understand how the media contributes to constructing, reproducing and deepening the social stigmas associated with working in the sex industry. We argue that pulling apart the historical and spatial variability of these stigmas and explicating their links to socio-structural contexts is a crucial step towards understanding their social construction. Exposing the socio-structural and human architecture of sex industry stigmas opens them to reinterpretation: insofar as new understandings position sex industry workers as individuals deserving of similar rights and protections as other "legitimate" workers, they have the capacity to facilitate a better and safer experience for this clandestine population.
We rely on two data sources for this paper. First, we analyse print media discussion of the sex industry in one metropolitan area of Canada, the Census Metropolitan Area of Victoria, British Columbia (B. C.), between 1980 and 2004 in a single regional daily newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist. We then compare these media narratives with the self-reported experiences of sex industry workers in the same city and over a comparable time period.
Media Narratives and the Production/Reproduction of Stigmas
Academic interest in the sex industry has predominantly been focussed on understanding how the commodification of women's bodies, sexualities and sexual labour shapes and is shaped by larger orders of sexual and gender inequality. In recent years, this scholarship has become quite polarized between those who regard the commercial exchange of sex as inherently oppressive and violent and those who regard it as simply an economic activity, problematic largely because those involved are persecuted (Jenness, 1990; MacKinnon, 1987). The parameters of this debate have constrained the impact of a growing body of empirical and theoretical scholarship suggesting that sex industry workers, like other workers, represent a heterogeneity of experiences and identities, encompassing both of the positions noted above (Shaver, 2005).
Also missing in this debate is an interest in the historical and spatial variability of dominant understandings of the sex industry as a "social problem." Symptomatic of this disinterest is the relatively meagre scholarship dedicated to understanding media constructions of sex industry work and, in particular, how these constructions are the sites at which "whore" stigmas are produced and reproduced, contested and transformed, and how they might differ from empirical reality (Lowman, 1987; Stenvoll, 2001).
Media constructions of the sex industry, however, do constitute an important area of inquiry from both theoretical and harm-reduction perspectives. First of all, media representations of gender, class, race and sexuality are important loci of self and personal identity construction (Seale, 2003). For those who become objects of negative or subjugating media narratives, whether or not these narratives are "truth," does not mitigate their ability to detrimentally affect physical health and emotional well-being (Benoit and Millar, 2001). In addition, contemporary media create social understanding between spatially distanced and/or socially segregated groups (Gitlin, 2003); as the sex industry work force constitutes a particularly clandestine and hidden population, for a significant portion of the citizenry media narratives represent the only sites at which they might interact with sex industry workers. The fictive characters and relationships created by media narratives in this context become relatively unassailable, at least to the extent that media audiences lack empirical experience by which to challenge them. Essentially, in the absence of any lived interaction with the sex industry, media texts are key cultural sites at which stigmas of sex work are produced and consumed by the majority of citizens.
Academic understandings of the role of media in the production/reproduction of dominant knowledges have been influenced by the work of Stuart Hall, among other cultural theorists (Barak, 1994; Hall, 1978; Kitzinger, 2000; Pateman, 1988; Sacks, 1996; Seale, 2003; Watkins and Emerson, 2000). Cultural studies approaches to media are distinguished by an attention to power as a player in the transmission of social knowledge and in the reception of values and meanings. This means that analyses of media should include interrogation of the structural relations in which media practices are embedded. A sizeable literature has fleshed out the various ways in which media narratives nourish gender stereotypes and normative orders of gender inequality by, for example, selective omission of issues that are more salient to women and the punctuation of issues that involve male newsmakers and authority figures (Watkins and Emerson, 2000). This literature underscores the more general claim that mainstream media practices are structurally embedded within hegemonic moral, economic and political orders, that media news, information and entertainment are told from particular social locations, and that these locations correspond with positions of moral, economic and political power (Sacks, 1996; Watkins and Emerson, 2000).
This is not to say that media knowledge is always false, nor does it have a necessary correspondence to hegemonic knowledge. Even if media narratives become encoded with meanings and values that shore up dominant moral orders, audiences must bring their own experiences and agendas to the interpretative lenses through which they decode media texts. The social meaning of any text is thus an interactive product of the process by which both news writers and audiences use their knowledge and experience to make sense of the news. In fact, this emergent nature of media meaning highlights how a myriad of other factors, which speak to the contexts in which news writers and audiences live, impinge upon and mediate text signification and interpretation. We draw here upon concepts from the literature on cultural framing in order to bring these contextual factors into our discussion.
Cultural framing has been an important concept in the more recent psychocognitive school of social movement studies; here, framing is applied to describe the ways in which social movement actors strive to communicate "actionable" goals to their constituents (Benford and Snow, 2000a; Benford and Snow, 2000b; Snow and Benford, 1988; Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford, 1986). In the field of media studies, framing has been widely used in order to...
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