Stereotyping

Richard Dyer

Introduction

• Gay people have rejected images of homosexuality on film for a long time
• “Before that, we simply accepted them as true and inevitable”
• Stereotyping…
• Many gay people believe stereotypes, “leading on the one hand to self-oppression so characteristic of gay people’s lives, and other the other to behavior in conformity with the stereotypes which of course only serves to confirm their truth” (353).
• Most stereotypes of gays in films are demeaning and offensive
• “The butch dyke and the camp queen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic queer, the predatory schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot, and all the rest” (353).

“Righteous dismissal does not make the stereotypes go away, and tends to prevent us from understanding just what stereotypes are, how they function, ideologically and aesthetically, and why they are so resilient in the face of our rejection of them” (353).

Introduction Cont...

• What do we put in stereotypes’ place?
• Assumed that the aim of character construction should be the creation of “realistic individuals”
• “...but, as I will argue, this may have as many drawbacks as its apparent opposite, ‘unreal’ stereotypes, and some form of typing may actually be preferable to it” (353).
• What is the definition of stereotyping and what are the alternatives?

Ideology and Types

• How do we come to our “understanding” of the people we encounter, in fiction as in life?
• “We get our information about them partly from what other people tell us - although we may not necessarily trust this - and, in fiction, from narrators and from the ‘thoughts’ of the characters, but most of our knowledge about them is based on the evidence in front of us: what they do and how they do it, what they say and how they say it, dress, mannerisms, where they live and so on” (354).
• How do we make sense of it?
• Four ways of organizing this information:
• Role
• Individual
• Type
• Member

Ideology and Types Cont...

• Role: the particular set of actions (which I take to include dress, speech, and gesture) that they are performing at the moment we encounter them
• You know from what people are doing what their social role is
• “Variables” of occupation, gender, age, and kinship
• What people do vs. what they are
• Role usually forms the basis for other inferences we make about people we encounter
• Individual: see a person in the totality of her/his roles - their sum total, specific combination and interaction - a totality, complex, specific, unique
• Relate the information that has been coded into roles to a notion of “personality” - they are psychological, or social psychological, inferences
• Type: see a person according to a logic that assumes a certain kind-of-person performs a given role
• Relate the information that has been coded into roles to a notion of “personality” - they are psychological, or social psychological, inferences

Ideology and Types Cont...

• Member: “The last inference we can make, however, is based on the realization that roles are related not just to abstract, neutral structures but to divisions in society, to groups that are in struggle with each other, primarily along class and gender lines but also along racial and sexual lines” (354).
• Member of a given class or social group
• This implies that there is “no way to make sense of people, or of constructing characters, that is somehow given, natural, or correct” (354).

Ideology and types Cont...

• All four relate to different, wider, and politically significant ways of understanding the world:
• Role: to a reified view of social structures as things that exist independently of human praxis
• Individual & Type: explanations of the world in terms of personal dispositions and individual psychologies
• Type: an understanding of history in terms of class struggle (though I extend the traditional concept of class here to include race, gender, and sex caste)
• The article deals first and at greatest length with the question of Type, but also Individuals and Members
• Type: “any simple, vivid, memorable, easily-grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or ‘development’ is kept to a minimum” (355).
• Social types, stereotypes, and member types

Social Type vs. Stereotype

• Social type vs. stereotype
• According to Orrin E. Klapp, in his book which is supposed to describe the range of kinds-of-people Americans would expect to encounter in day-to-day life:
• “...stereotypes refer to things outside one’s social world, whereas social types refer to things with which one is familiar; stereotypes tend to be conceived as functionless or dysfunctional (or, if functional, serving prejudice and conflict mainly), whereas social types serve the structure of society at many points”
• Klapp is not wrong (it’s a useful distinction), but who is the “one” referred to and whom does the social structure itself serve?
• Nearly all his social types turn out to be white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male
• “In other words, a system of social- and stereotypes refers to what is, as it were, within and beyond the pale of normalcy” (355).

Social Types vs. Stereotypes Cont...

• “Types are instances which indicate those who live by the rules of society (social types) and those whom the rules are designed to exclude (stereotypes)” (355).
• Social types: open-ended, more provisional, more flexible, to create the sense of freedom, choice, self-definition for those within the boundaries of normalcy
• Boundaries clearly delineated
• You appear to pick your social type
• Stereotypes: help maintain the boundary maintenance, characteristically fixed, clear-cut, unalterable
• You are condemned to a stereotype
• The dramatic, ridiculous, or horrific quality of stereotypes show how important it is to live by society’s rules...

“The establishment of normalcy through social- and stereotypes is one aspect of the habit of ruling groups - a habit of such enormous political consequences that we tend to think of it as far more premeditated than it actually is - to attempt to fashion the whole of society according to their own world-view, value-system, sensibility and ideology” (356).

Hegemony

• World-view of the ruling groups is “normal,” “natural,” and/or “inevitable”
• It’s also for “everyone”
• In so far as they succeed, they establish their hegemony
• Hegemony is an active concept!
• Must be built and rebuilt in the face of both implicit and explicit challenges to it
• Establishment of hegemony through stereotyping has two principal features according to Roger Brown:
• Ethnocentrism: thinking of the norms of one’s group as right for men everywhere - application of the norms appropriate to one’s own culture to that of others
• Assumption that given social groups “have inborn and unalterable psychological characteristics”

“In stereotyping, the dominant groups apply their norms to subordinated groups, find the latter wanting, hence inadequate, inferior, sick, or grotesque and hence reinforcing the dominant groups’ own sense of the legitimacy of their domination” (356).

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Stereotyping Through Iconography

• “Films use a certain set of visual and aural signs which immediately bespeak homosexuality and connote the qualities associated, stereotypically, with it” (357).
• “Iconography is a kind of short-hand - it places a character quickly and economically” (358).
• Synecdoche: taking the part for the whole
• 19th-20th century Blackface/minstrel shows, racist cartoons (clip 2), 1970s Blaxploitation, 90s/00s music videos, etc.

Stereotyping Through Structure & Individuals

• Stereotypes also established by the function of the character in the film’s structures
• Magical Negro, Mammy, Jezebel, Uncle Tom, always die in horror movies, etc.
• Capitalism and its peculiar conception of the individual…
• Enlightenment and beyond…
• Individual characters with individual characterizations
• Dynamic
• Progress
• Changing - an actual character arc
• Going against type
• 12 Years a Slave

Member Types

• “Social- and stereotypes are linked to psychological categories, sorts of personality, within or without a cultural hegemony. Member types, on the other hand, are linked to historically and culturally specific and determined social groups or class and their praxes, which are almost bound to be outside the present cultural hegemony (in so far as it has so much invested in the notion of individuality)” (363).
• “Member types may, for now, be achieved by strategies such as more ‘obvious’ typing, melodrama, fantasy and montage, which, as Pam Cook writes of Dorothy Arzner’s films, ‘denaturalize’ the stereotypes, and allow for an understanding of the concrete and ideological forces that determine them” (363).
• Do the Right Thing