Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, 8th edition

Racism

A B C D E F G H I

JK

L M N O P R S T U V

XYZ

W

Questionnaires A popular method of data

collection, a questionnaire basically consists of

a series of questions designed to obtain factual

information and/or information about people’s

attitudes, values, opinions, or beliefs about a

particular subject or issue. A questionnaire can

also be constructed so as to contain questions

about a range of topics or issues. Th ey are regu-

larly used as a tool of market research and are

central to audience measurement.

Because it is not usually possible to give a

questionnaire to all those who make up the

group in which you are interested, question-

naires are normally given to a sample (see

sampling); care needs to be taken to ensure

that the sample represents the total population,

that is the total number of people in that group

in all significant respects. Questionnaires are

useful for gathering large amounts of data but

may be less useful for investigating an issue

in depth; here participant observation

or interviews may be more useful. Further,

constructing an unambiguous, unbiased and

productive questionnaire is not easy, nor is the

impartial analysis of the responses collected. See

topic guide under research methods.

QWERTY Arrangement of letters on the tradi-

tional typewriter and computer keyboard,

devised in 1873 to overcome jamming problems

on the world’s first production machine, a

Remington.

R

Rachel’s Law See defamation.

Racism Discrimination against individuals or

groups of people on the basis of assumed

racial differences. The term is problematic in

that there is some argument as to whether the

concept of race is useful anyway in describing

biological diff erences between people. Racism,

though, rests on the belief that diff erent races

with specifi c characteristics can be meaningfully

identifi ed. At an individual level such discrimi-

nation takes the form of prejudice, whereas the

term racism is often used to describe the way in

which such discrimination is embedded into the

structure of a society. Cultural racism refers to

the perpetuation, consciously or unconsciously,

of such discrimination and the beliefs and

values on which it rests through the cultural

institutions of a society, for example education

and the mass media.

As Stuart Hall notes in ‘Th e whites of their

eyes: Racist ideologies and the media’ in The

Media Reader (BFI Publishing, 1990), edited by

and feature photography; named after Joseph

Pulitzer (1847–1911), Hungarian-born newspa-

per proprietor and rival of William Randolph

Hearst (1863–1932), model for Orson Welles’s

fi lm Citizen Kane, 1943.

Q

Quadrophony See gramophone.
Quality press See broadsheets.
Queer theory Views sexual identity as essentially
fluid, ambiguous and unstable. In examining
the dynamics of sexual identity it explores, as
Annamarie Jagose notes in Queer Theory: An
Introduction (New York University Press, 1996),
the ‘mismatches between sex, gender and desire’.
Queer theory challenges the view that hetero-
sexual desire is ‘natural’, unproblematic and to be
regarded as the norm. Indeed it challenges the
view that there can be any ‘natural’ and stable
sexual identity or orientation.
Its concerns include not only lesbian and gay
sexual orientations but, according to Jagose,
‘cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambi-
guity and gender-corrective surgery’. Further,
according to Paul Burston and Colin Richardson,
editors of A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men
and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1995), it ‘seeks
to locate Queerness in places that had previ-
ously been thought of as strictly for straights’.
In A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory
(Edinburgh University Press, 2003) Nikki Sulli-
van discusses examples of ‘queer’ readings of a
number of texts ranging from Batman Forever
to Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.
An influential perspective informing the
development of the theory is that provided by
Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990,
1999). Butler argues that gender categories and
notions of identity and sexual orientation associ-
ated with them are not natural, but rather are
social constructs which rely heavily upon every-
day performances and interaction with others.
Such performances are often repeated and typi-
cally are framed by social expectations of what
constitutes appropriate behaviour. It is through
the repetition of performances that notions of
gender and gender identity are constructed. Th e
process of ‘performativity’, not nature, is at the
heart of gender categories. Butler’s theory of
performativity facilitates examination of a range
of possibilities that may exist as regards gender,
identity and sexual orientation.
▶Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox, Queer Th eory
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).