Third World women, despite barely coming into (real) contact with them, we somehow seem to have a clear cut picture of who they are and what they look like, imprinted in our minds. We envision them as hard working mothers, carrying babies on their hips, trying to survive in their war torn country. But where did this perception come from, how did we internalize it and is this depiction trustworthy or rather stereotypical? To truly understand these representations, we need to look at the broader context in which they are created. A context of racism and patriarchy.

The fact that representations aren’t neutral but in fact biased, is something I’ve previously discussed in my blogs, and it’s clearly applicable to this topic as well. In this context, the practices of representation are clearly linked to the colonial idea of Orientalism and its conviction of Western superiority. Additionally, for Third World women this practice is even more complex as their ethnic inferiority is intertwined with another kind of discrimination, namely their inferior position as women.

Their intersectional identities lead them to be represented in three different ways: as housewives, as eroticized sex objects and lastly as passive victims. When Babette introduced these three representations, I immediately recognized all three of them. These representations don’t just reduce Third World women to passive, helpless victims who need the West to help them out, but they also confine these women to a patriarchal discourse by solely focusing on their womanly duties instead of their individual characteristics.

Those passive patriarchal representations are combined with more active neoliberal influences. In our neoliberal context, Third World women are granted a little bit of agency, agency to work hard. If they work hard enough everything will be alright. These
depictions ease our Western minds and make us accept the conditions in which
these women live, as they lead us to naively assume that if they work as hard as we do, they will one day become just as successful as the West. Consequently, we blatantly ignore the structural inequalities and oppression that rule over these women’s lives, and thus simplify their complex situation.

Personally I don’t believe these representations will change, seen as the neoliberal West benefits from the Third World’s inferior position. These neoliberal and patriarchal
structures only allow a restricted positive shift towards a form of agency they approve, and silence all that deviates from their norms. For them, Third World women are mothers, housewives and sexual objects, but not independent individuals.

1975, the Vietnam war is coming to an end. A terrible era characterized by war crimes and an estimated 3.8 million deaths is finally over[1]. This joyful news also meant the end of something else, something that helped ending the atrocities of the war. In 1975 we said goodbye to true war journalism and welcomed a new practice now known as embedded journalism.

To understand what this means we need to take a deeper look into journalism in general. Journalisms main goal is to help the public form their own opinion on certain subjects by providing them with objective, unbiased information. A crucial demand to make this possible is the deontological norm of independence.[2] This implies taking on a neutral position when collecting and reporting information to prevent a certain form of bias, which is especially crucial in times of war and conflict. American journalists reporting on the Vietnam War didn’t solely rely on governmental information, but instead also collected info from the Vietnamese civilians. Their reports revealed a vast amount of atrocities, resulting in a drastic change of the public opinion surrounding the Vietnam war.

Unfortunately the change this war journalism had instilled is the exact reason why governments have made the practice impossible and replaced it with embedded journalism. Whereas before journalists could freely report what they saw when visiting war grounds, they now must adhere to the info they get from the military, seen as they offer the journalists protection during their stay in the conflict zone. These circumstances make taking on a critical position difficult.

Embedded journalism thus makes it impossible to report in a neutral and unbiased way seen as they only collect information from one side of the conflict, which goes against the journalistic deontology. This practice produces an unbalanced information stream to the public and that unreliable info will then be used to form the public opinion. By only reporting one part of the story we can almost consider this practice as a sort of propaganda technique.

But we must acknowledge that a different approach is rather difficult. As a journalist, it’s not safe to roam around looking for information with the possible threat of being kidnapped or killed. Yet to ensure not misleading the public, journalists must still remain critical when reporting and acknowledge that the info they provide is in a sense biased and not at all complete.

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[1] https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250894486_Embedded_journalism_-_more_than_a_conflictreporting_issue

Annihilation, The Beguiled, Prince of Persia… Three film titles that have one thing in common: whitewashing. This concept has been popping up everywhere, but what exactly does it mean? In the context of film it could be defined as the practice of letting a white actor play the role of a person of colour. One of many examples is how James Cooke recently chose Ianthe Tavernier – a Caucasian woman – to take on the role of princess Jasmine in his Aladdin play. It’s important to note that whitewashing is nothing new or unique, but in fact very recurrent[1].

Although at first sight this practice might seem innocent, it is in fact problematic. When looking deeper into it, we notice that it’s inherently linked to a Eurocentric perspective. The latter is described by Edward Saïd in his book Orientalism[2] as a worldview that sets western society as the norm and considers everything different from it as deviant. Saïd argues that Eurocentric practices contain subtle forms of intrinsic racism, by mainly promoting a worldview that discriminates everything that deviates from the western norm. In Hollywood films this is done through the use of whitewashing. People of colour are in a sense annihilated from the screen and thus also from our worldview.

Another Eurocentric practice is stereotyping. Occasionally when ethnic minorities are included in films or plays, it is done in very stereotypical ways. So e.g. Arab people will be portrayed as terrorists or Afro-American people as gangsters. This leads to a reduction in people of colour to a ‘type’ that consists of merely one generalizing characteristic, whereas the white actors play roles that include character development and complex personalities.

These discriminatory practices also have a negative influence on matters of representation. From a sociological perspective it has been proven that films and media are crucial sources of information during socialization. They help us create a worldview and this is where those Eurocentric practices become problematic. They create a distorted and one sided view on the world, that is a superior Eurocentric view that lacks to include diversity as something valuable.

Some speculate that the use of whitewashing and stereotyping will not quickly disappear, as these Eurocentric practices are deeply rooted in the racist structures of Hollywood. However, counteractions have shown the opposite is true. Films with diverse casts like Black Panther and governments applying diversity charters show that change is possible.

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[1] https://thefilmstage.com/features/the-return-of-hollywood-eurocentrism-or-something-worse/

[2] file:///H:/Downloads/9781315837925_googlepreview.pdf