Overview

The Judgment of Gender addresses the ways in which women are centered, while simultaneously silenced, in popular culture and, all too often, maligned for simply being women. The text focuses on key areas and times where women are highlighted as ""problematic,"" including a generational legacy of harming women, women who speak and act out, women who occupy a space not traditionally ""theirs,"" women who are physically harmed for being women, and women who harm other women. Grounded in critical media literacy, the text addresses, but does not wallow in, dark and difficult topics. Rather, the text asks questions of pop culture, inviting readers to look differently, and ideally with more nuance, at how stories of celebrity and those thrust into celebrity are framed. Women and stories discussed include Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and the legacy of speaking out against sexual assault; Sinéad O'Connor, Britney Spears, and the dangers of acting out; Kathleen Hanna, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Zoë Quinn, and the risks of occupying space not traditionally associated with women; missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) and the threat of violence against women for the audacity of being women; and Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Maureen Dowd, and the harm that women perpetuate on other women. The text closes with suggestions for how to use basic concepts from critical media literacy in our roles as audiences and creators of mediated communication, operating as a lens through which one can deconstruct and talk back to the media's treatment of women.

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Reviews

""A model of critical media literacy for our desperate and dangerous times."" -David Buckingham, media and communications scholar ""Allison Butler perfectly captures the way modern patriarchy torments women in the public eye. Her framework of women being centered and silenced applies to headlines and trending topics nearly every day. It is an essential read for anyone wanting to understand why stories about gender-based violence dominate pop culture, but little seems to change. In writing The Judgment of Gender, Butler finally allows the women who are most egregiously harmed to shape the narrative. In doing so, she voices a path forward."" -Kat Tenbarge, Independent Journalist, Spitfire News

Author Information

Allison Butler is a Senior Lecturer, Associate Chair, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She serves as the Vice President on the Board of the Media Freedom Foundation. She is the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy, most recently, Educating Media Literacy: The Need for Teacher Education in Critical Media Literacy (Brill, 2020) and Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools (Routledge, 2024; co-authored with Nolan Higdon). She is a co-author of multiple practical resources for media literacy education, including the open-source text Critical Media Literacy and Civic Learning: Interactive Explorations for Students and Teachers (2021, EdTechBooks; co-authored with Torrey Trust and Robert Malot) and the only text on critical media literacy for young readers, The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People (2022, Censored Press and Seven Stories Press). Shealeigh Voitl is Project Censored's associate director. She is a co-editor of the State of the Free Press yearbook series and co-author of the Project's Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames. Her writing has also been featured in Truthout, The Progressive, Mondoweiss, and Ms. Magazine. She lives in Chicago.

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