ABSTRACT
What do media representations of gender, those images that re-present females and males to us, contribute to children’s understandings about themselves and who they should strive to be? How do the media construct what is portrayed as normative femininity and normative masculinity in our societies? We begin to address these key, general questions by reacquainting ourselves with what exists in practice. This will be followed by presenting a broad conceptualization of these issues, grounded in scholarly thinking and research, that serves as the rich resource for interpretations presented throughout this book. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of gender representations for children’s socialization and then, given all of the above, a brief presentation of the project’s research agenda.
