Having read Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young’s Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse, I realized how there are individuals who do not get any say in how they are portrayed, individuals usually have the chance to say their stories themselves. Based on Jiwani and Young’s research in analyzing articles about stereotypes on women in Vancouver, I believe that it can be related to the materials we have studied in our Sociology class.

Mead’s “The Self” theory in which there is the “I” and the “me”, which was discussed in our Sociology class a couple of weeks back. Mead’s theory rose from the view that the self comes from how an individual interacts with society, meaning how they respond, react, and behave. According to Mead, the “me” is the socializing aspect. It is how the person has grown due to experiences and social interactions with society. The “I” is the reaction from the “me”, it is how the person follows social and cultural norms without needing anyone to explain the rules.

Going back to Jiwani and Young’s research, the women mentioned in the articles are the ones from the minority group. These women have a stereotypical label of being sex-workers and drug-consumers (899). Jiwani and Young first start off discussing about the women who have gone missing and the background hypothetical situations that could have happened to them, which is most likely done by aa serial killer (896-897). Multiple headliner articles have emerged from the stories of these women and yet, they do not have a say in what goes out. The headlines for these articles use loaded language to get to the point of the whole article. In my opinion, this can give the audience a perspective. For instance, the headline “…Women Have History of Drugs, Prostitution and Links to Downtown Eastside” (904), leads the audience to have the stereotype of how the “I” of the victimized women is. They are already generalized to have the association with drugs and prostitution. This can shift the audience’s perspective into the bias of the headline.

We also discussed the topic of race and gender in our Sociology class and I think that it links well to Jiwani and Young’s research. Race and gender discrimination will always happen. In this case, the discrimination occurs to the African-American and Aboriginal women. Jiwani and Young’s section on “Mediations of radicalized and gendered violence” demonstrates the newsworthy stories about violence against women, but are written differently by reporters. Black men’s stories are more likely to appear in the front cover news while Black women’s stories are barely even told. This signifies how the different genders are portrayed to society.

In sum, most minorities have little to no say on how they are portrayed to society, or how society views them. It is in rare cases where they are able to tell their story and it is important that those who write the story should have accurate information.

Works Cited:

Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917.