Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in by Stephen Harper (auth.)

By Stephen Harper (auth.)

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Extra info for Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Representations of Mental Distress

Sample text

As Graeme Turner (1986: 14) notes in relation to film, analyses of film made by literary critics, psychologists or sociologists, often see film as an unproblematic medium. They ignore the necessity of enquiring very deeply into its structures in order to understand what a specific film, or film generally, might do. I am not alone in raising these kinds of questions about the need to study representations of mental distress in their generic and formal contexts. In his recent study of the representation of mental illness in television documentary, Cross (2004: 202) notes of the Glasgow Media Group’s work by Philo, Henderson and McLaughlin: Philo, Henderson, and McLaughlin (1993) ignored aesthetic differences between film and TV while noting that negative stereotypes of mental illness are dominant across a range of visual media.

While the term arguably carries more stigmatising connotations than ‘mental illness’ in certain contexts, it also eludes psychiatric reification. ‘Madness’ also seems an appropriately comprehensive term to use where the focus is upon cultural contexts – as in Fleming and Manvell’s historical survey, Images of Madness (1985). In many cases, talk of ‘madness’ rather than ‘mental illness’ also permits a shift in critical focus from marginalised individuals to questions of institutional and social disorder.

This criticism might also be levelled as other, more recent works on media and madness, such as Patrick Fuery’s Madness and Cinema (2004), which, for all its theoretical sophistication, tends to bundle together films which differ significantly in origin, popularity and genre. Of course, this generalising tendency may well be a necessary aspect of early studies in the relatively under-researched area of media and mental distress. In any fledgeling area of academic enquiry, ground-breaking texts are often wide-ranging in their scope and therefore inevitably subject to endless refinement and revision by subsequent critics with narrower textual focuses or disciplinary interests.

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