Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader

This provocative new edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media engages students with a comprehensive introduction to mass media studies. Editors Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez present new and classic readings that critically analyze some of the most pervasive and influential forms of media entertainment culture, including  advertising, reality tv  shows,  sitcoms and dramatic series, pornography, fan and celebrity gossip websites, videogames and online social media and virtual reality enterprises. Issues of power related to gender, race,  class and sexuality are integrated into a wide range of compelling articles examining the economic and cultural implications of mass media as institutions,  such as the political economy of media production, textual analysis, and media consumption, including current questions raised by fan participation in production and distribution.

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, where she is also chair of the American studies department. She has been researching and writing about the pornography industry for over twenty years. She has written numerous articles on pornography, media images of women, and representations of race in pop culture. Her latest book is PORNLAND: How Pornography has Hijacked our Sexuality. She is a cofounder of the activist group Stop Porn Culture!

Jean M. Humez is a professor emerita of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she has taught courses in both women’s studies and American studies and chaired the women’s studies department. She designed and taught an undergraduate women and the media course early in her career, and came to collaborate with Gail Dines through her interest in media text analysis. She has also published books and articles on African American women’s spiritual and secular autobiographies, and on women and gender in Shaker religion. Her most recent book is Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories.