Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

It's No Secret Justin Wants to Be Black

2016; IGI Global; Linguagem: Inglês

10.4018/978-1-5225-0212-8.ch002

2328-1324

Imaani Jamillah El-Burki, Rachel R. Reynolds,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

Research shows that media representations of race, gender and social class designed for consumption by the millennial generation create a world of symbolic equality via narratives of racial harmony, female empowerment and forms of exaggeration where everyone seems to have a middle and or upper middle class quality of life. In general, the changing face of diversity as represented in media has been cast as a neoliberal politic, where ideologies of free markets are extended into representing a sense of equality among individuals and their respective social groups. While scholars have investigated exaggerated representations of inclusivity in a variety of media genres, there is limited scholarship investigating the ways in which comedy serves the neoliberalist agenda. Comedy Central's Roast of Justin Bieber aired March 2015 and has been replicated in multiple forms. The current study is an in depth discourse and content analysis of the racial and gender jokes appearing in this program. It concludes that what appears to be a move beyond race is instead working against a post-race reality.