Research Log B

"The Role of Stereotypes"
By Richard Dyer 
Published 1998

"The word stereotype is today almost always a term of abuse. This stems from the wholly justified objections of various groups -- in recent years, blacks, women and gays, in particular -- to the ways in which they find themselves stereotypes in the mass media and in everyday speech." B1 

"It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights"B2

"AN ORDERING PROCESS
 stereotypes as a form of 'ordering' the mass of complex and inchoate data that we receive from the world are only particular form -- to do with the representation and categorization of persons"B3

"part of the way societies make sense of themselves"B4

"not only is any given society's given ordering of reality an historical product but it is also necessarily implicated in the power relations in that society -- as Berger as Luckman put it, 'he who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality'"B5

"A SHORTCUT
easily-grasped form of representation but none the less capable of condensing a great deal of complex information and a host of connotations"B6

"REFERENCE
as a projection on to the 'world"
"In this perspective, stereotypes are a particular subcategory of a broader category of fictional characters"B7
"The type is any character constructed through the use of a few immediately recognizable and defining traits"B8

"the most important function of the stereotype: to maintain sharp boundary definitions. To define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it."B9