You may be asking what codes are, and how people recognize codes like camp. To answer this question we will turn to the science of semiotics. Semiotics is useful because it breaks down how words get their meanings, how meaning is communicated and how meanings can change over time and across cultures. In this section we will briefly consider some basic elements of semiotics. We will also look at how socially constructed signification shapes the stories we can tell in terms of narratives, discourse and content.

10.3.1 Constructing Meaning

Figure 10.4. “What is Semiotics? [Youtube Video].” This 4.04 minute video can help you better understand semiotics. Standard YouTube License.

Semiotics is the study of how meaning, or signification attaches to words, images or concepts, called signifiers to create units of meaning, called signs. A child can generally be expected to learn around 50,000 words in the first five years of life. We learn these words by listening to and communicating with people around us. Have you ever considered what we are actually learning as we learn words? Semiotics helps us understand that we are learning how to communicate shared meanings about objects and concepts.

For example, imagine being a young child walking on the beach with your parent and seeing a large shiny brown thing swimming in the waves. Knowing that it was in the water and swimming, and having learned that some things that swim in the water are fish, we might point and identify it as a “fish”! Our parent smiles and correct us, “That’s a seal.” To help us understand why it is a seal and not a fish, our parents might explain some of the differences between fish and seals. When we get home we may get out our crayons and draw a picture of something that looks sort of like what we saw earlier, and we may ask our parent to help us write the word s-e-a-l.

Semiotics categorizes objects or concepts as signified, and the words or other symbols we use to name the objects or concepts as signifiers. The things that swim are signified. The words “fish” and “seal” are signifiers. The picture we drew that looks sort of like the thing we saw swimming is also a signifier, as is the combination of written letters s-e-a-l. A signifier and the idea or object it signifies are together a sign. So the swimming thing that is not a fish and the new word we learned for it form a sign for the thing that all of us reading this chapter recognize to be a seal. The picture we drew when we got home and the shiny thing we saw in the water also forms a sign for seal, as does the shiny swimming thing that is not a fish and the letters s-e-a-l. The video in figure 10.4 can help you better understand semiotics.

The direct meaning of a sign is called denotation All English speaking people agree that letters s-e-a-l refer to, or denote one of several furry sea mammals. Sometimes, however, people have additional less direct ideas about seals. What do you think of when you think of seals? What do they mean to you? People who have hunted seals for meat and fur may ascribe a different meaning to a seal than a family of vegetarian nature lovers might. These indirect meanings are called connotations. A good way to remember the difference between the two types of meaning is that denotation refers to the dictionary definition, and connotation refers to the emotional context.

Returning to John Waters’ movies, we might say that a masculine entertainer who wears women’s clothes denotes drag. The connotations of drag may be very different between two people, depending on their cultural context. For example some people may see a person in drag as connoting a dangerous threat, while others may read drag as connoting artistic freedom. Denotative and connotative meanings are determined by culturally specific codes, and it is through these shifting codes that meaning is communicated, negotiated, changed or reinforced.

One more important thing about how we learn and communicate meaning is that meaning is constructed by difference. In the example above we learn what a seal is by differentiating between a seal and a fish. As we learn more about sea mammals, we further differentiate between, say, whales and otters and seals. This basic fact about how we learn can help us understand why we are so attached to binary thinking when it comes to questions of identity. Our earliest social learning is to differentiate ourselves from others. First from our parents and caregivers, and then other individuals; me or not me. From there we go on to learn to differentiate our family from other families. Our tribes, and our communities and so on are all differentiated by the basic pattern of me or not me, us or not us.

Even though we know that sex traits, gender and sexuality are not binary, we have traditionally been socialized about gender through differentiation in binary terms of what it means to be a boy or a girl. Girls get one category, and boys get the category that is not girls. In our nursery rhymes and in the games we play, in the tv shows made for us, in our clothes, and even in how we learn to make friends, we have learned a binary set of rules based on boy or not boy, and girl or not girl. We even learn rules about who’s allowed to transgress those boundaries and who is not. For example, boys who want to wear “girl clothes” are usually socially disciplined more harshly than girls who want to wear “boy clothes”. Parents and caregivers who intentionally create opportunities for less binary socialization can also be subject to harsh social discipline.

10.3.2 Audiences and Users

In media and communication studies we also think about receivers, audiences, and users. It is worth breaking these concepts down into separate components to try to understand them. However, these concepts are artificial constructs, and the line between receivers, users, and audiences is becoming increasingly soft and blurred and they may have faded in their usefulness.

When dealing with one-to-one or one-to-few communication, we usually use the label of receiver to describe those whom the message targets. As articulated in the transmission models of communication, a receiver can also be a sender, but for now, it’s easiest to start with the simplest articulation of a receiver, where a receiver can be defined as anyone targeted for or taking in information or communication. Leaving the reality that receivers often become senders aside, we can still regard receivers as not merely passive sponges of information – they can interpret material, bring to bear their own experiences, and ‘read’ messages in a number of different ways.

In terms of information received, we can generally say that information is decoded in three ways. There is the dominant reading, where the message intended is the message received. There is a negotiated reading, where the receiver accepts some of the intended message, and rejects other parts of it. Finally, there are oppositional readings, where the reader completely rejects the message intended. And of course, there is also the possibility that the message is not received – through miscommunication or a failure to communicate. It is also worth remembering here that communication is never ideologically neutral.

All of this forms the core of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Hall argued that any piece of information can be encoded in multiple ways, and every message has more than one meaning. We refer to this as the polysemy of messages – literally, the ‘many meanings.’ Therefore, communication is always subject to decisions made within the context and systems employed – meaning-making is not natural but cultural. There isn’t such a thing as a ‘right’ way to read a message, only the preferred way within a particular context.

The cultural aspect and interpretation of a message shows in the different non-verbal signs described in the video above. They depend on national, thus cultural backgrounds and might have different meanings in other cultures or might simply not be understood. Also, each gesture would only make sense in a certain context.

When thinking about mass communication, and broadcasting to a large number of people (many-to-many communication), we need to ask whether or not an audience is just an aggregate of receivers. Is there anything special about an audience?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question. A very basic view might see the audience merely as a group of people who are receiving the same message at the same time, whether it be a musical performance or a TV show. But the breadth of communicative options these days quickly exposes the problems with such a simple definition. If one person records a show another on their DVR, another Streams it from Netflix, another watches it when it is first broadcast on ‘free-to-air’ TV, and another buys the DVD, are they collectively still an audience? They’re all receiving the same text, but in different modes and at different times.

We might instead try to think about audiences both as cultural constructs and as responses to particular media or texts. We can define audiences in terms of location (such as the spectators at a rugby game), by population demographics (for example, children), by medium or channel (such as television or Youtube), or by message content (political speeches or soap operas), as well as by time of transmission or reception.

How we perceive audiences has also changed over time, from passive to active to fragmented. We started off in pre-modern times thinking about the audience in terms of the public. Publics tended to be in the same place, at the same time, with participants sharing similar values and culture. It wasn’t until the rise of the media and mass communication that audiences started to become more dispersed and heterogeneous. It is this mass audience that is perhaps more relevant to media scholars.

The mass audience is an interesting phenomena, given how dispersed they are. For much of the 20th century, the mass audience was characterized by a lack of self-generated identity – only with a few rare texts, like certain bands, or shows or sports teams – did people share a common identity in belonging to that audience. For the most part, members of the mass audience, particularly the mediated mass audience, were dispersed across time, space, and culture. Furthermore, what identities they did have were classified by externally generated markers such as demographics, like age, gender, race, and economic profile.

This era of audience research was very much focused around marketing demographics. Leaving aside public service broadcasting for the moment, a lot of information captured about audiences, and indeed the language we used to describe audiences, came from marketers and program buyers, who determined which mass media texts made it into general circulation based on what kind of audience it would attract (children, housewives, retirees) and therefore what kind of advertising they could sell on it.

Is the idea of the audience still relevant for the 21st Century? A simple test might be to think about what you did last night? With an increasing plethora of channels, modes, and sources of information and entertainment, our existing notion of the mass audience is fractured more than ever.

While the audience still has some use as a concept, particularly as we define the demographics of our audience more tightly, a new concept has come to the fore in communication research. There are a few different labels given to similar concepts, so let’s start with the idea of the user. A user has a number of definitions given the context, but to start with, we can define a user as an active agent who uses available tools to interact with information.

A user is of interest to us because they move through a number of different communicative positions simultaneously. They can be both senders and receivers, audiences and producers, engaged in interpersonal communication that is also public performance. Users form networks, and act as nodes which both pass on and reinterpret information taken in from multiple sources, often other users. Users interact with other users to form networks along which information is not only sent and received, but also modified and interpreted.

These messy networks quickly go beyond any simple, linear model that we might use for understanding audiences. The rise of the user in both the interpersonal and mass communication landscape has been enabled to a large extent by information communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. But a lot of the interplay between users that we’ve been seeing reflects other, small scale social networks, such as the pre-modern idea of the village.

10.3.3 Genre, Narrative, Discourse and Content

Now that we have dipped into the deep well of media and communication studies to gather some rudimentary tools for analyzing how social meanings about sex, gender and sexuality are constructed in language, let’s apply these tools to some basic elements of storytelling texts: genre, narrative, discourse and content.

Figure 10.5. The film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022), features complex feminine leads in traditionally masculine dominated genres of martial arts action and science fiction adventure films.

Genre refers to the categories used to classify stories, art, music and film. For example romance, mysteries, and horror are all common film genres. Each genre has a specific set of elements that audiences recognize and expect. Part of the satisfaction of watching a movie comes from how writers, directors and producers use the available elements of a given genre to meet, challenge or subvert an audience’s expectations based on the genre of a film. For example, we expect a noir mystery to be atmospheric and bleak, and we look forward to seeing how the filmmakers use lighting, music, narrative and dialog to satisfy our expectations.

Genres can also be blended or hybridized by combining two or more genres to provide satisfying entertainment for a broader audience. For example, the film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) casts Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu as leads in a mother-daughter comedy that blends traditionally masculine dominated genres of martial arts action films and science fiction adventure films.

Narrative refers to how a story is told. Narrative elements include story– what happens, and plot – how the story unfolds. Narrative fixes a story in time with a beginning and an end. As a story unfolds a series of events related by cause and effect lead to a conclusion in which something has changed. This narrative arc can take many forms, as stories can begin at the end, or the middle and move back and forth through time or they can proceed in a straightforward linear manner.

Tropes are genre-specific narrative metaphors that reference or signify a recognizable plot. Cinderella trope, which is foreshadowed by the rats that Tracy feeds in the opening scenes of “Hairspray”, is an old and well-used trope in romantic comedies, in which a kind and good hearted young women who transcends the social limitations of class by transforming from plain to beautiful, thereby concealing her true social status, and winning the affection of a wealthy man. Classic romantic comedies that use the Cinderella trope include My Fair Lady (Warner Brothers, 1964), and Pretty Woman (Touchstone Pictures, 1990).

Tropes can reproduce and normalize commonly held gender stereotypes. Sometimes, the tropes become so embedded in the stories we tell that we forget that other stories are even possible. However, tropes can also be repurposed to reveal the limits of familiar narratives and to challenge ideas about power and identity that we may take for granted. For example, the Cinderella trope in Hairspray is playfully reworked so that Tracy is her own fairy godmother. She has already mastered the fashions and moves of the day and has no need to change herself in preparation for the dance where she will win the prince’s heart. She doesn’t hide her size or her working-class identity, or pretend to be someone she’s not. She doesn’t need magic to turn rats into horses, because her carriage is a garbage truck that she flags down on her own. And, spoiler alert, when Tracy storms the castle, she brings a host of other working class and African American people with her. Tracy is an empowered Cinderella who is not waiting to be rescued and is not afraid to be herself. For viewers, it can be satisfying to see the old trope re-imagined to create new stories and new possibilities.

Narrative also considers perspective. The shape a story can take can vary depending on who is telling the tale, who they are telling it to, and whose perspective is centered in the telling. Stories are most often told from the perspective of the protagonist. Of the 100 top grossing films in 2022, there were no trans or nonbinary protagonists and only a third of those films centered the perspective of a sole female protagonist (Lauzen, 2023).

Discourse and content analysis can reveal how knowledge, values and beliefs are constructed in the stories we tell. In literary criticism, discourse refers to the conversation between the content creator and the audience. Discourse analysis can also reveal how power is constructed within a text. One approach to discourse analysis involves describing the “world” that is being represented in a story, along with the roles embodied by the characters, their relationships and power dynamics between them (Fairclough, 1995, in Gillespie and Toynbee, 2006). Content refers to the words, ideas and images that are used to tell the story. Content analysis is also concerned with uncovering assumptions about power and privilege in language. Quantitative content analysis actually counts elements, such as how many times an image, word or idea is referenced. Qualitative content analysis considers the meanings conveyed in a text.

Alison Bechdel, author of the groundbreaking comic, Dykes to Watch Out For created a simple, tongue-in-cheek example of discourse and content analysis that has become known as The Bechdel-Wallace Test (1985). The test uses three questions to highlight the lack of complex, fem-presenting characters in film, (1) Does the movie have at least two women in it who have names? (2) Do the women talk to each other? (3) Do they talk to each other about something besides a man? It’s funny because it’s true! Of the 100 top grossing films in 2022, one nonbinary person had a speaking role, .10% of all speaking roles belonged to trans people, and 37% of speaking roles belonged to women. Furthermore women with speaking roles were less likely to be seen in work-related settings than men (Lauzen, 2023).