Stereotyping and Stereotypes – Comprehensive Study Notes

Abstract Overview

• Author: Michael Pickering, article published via Wiley Online Library, (2015).
• Core claim: Stereotyping represents & evaluates others in ways that ratify and endorse unequal social relations.
  • Makes differences appear fixed, absolute, unchanging.
  • Operates through a two-way but one-sided relationship that always benefits the status quo.
• Consequences for targets:
  • Social standing diminished; reduced to a single trait/disposition.
  • Acts as a distancing mechanism creating radical separation between “us” and “them”.

Definition of Stereotyping

• A cultural practice of representing & judging people in fixed, unyielding terms.
• Revolves around alleged characteristics of a category assignment.
  • Removes individuality; treats persons as homogeneous & naturalized embodiments of a trait.
• Key mechanism: the fallacy of essentialism (identity = one necessary attribute).
• Contrast with ordinary cognitive schemas:
  • Normal schemas are flexible, revisable with new experience.
  • Stereotypes are rigid, block revision, erect social barriers.

Practice, Purveyors & Purposes

• Supports existing power structures, often wielded by groups with greater power & status.
  • Example: anti-Semitic stereotypes historically justified Christian/white dominance.
• Can also be used by the relatively powerless as scapegoating (e.g., travellers, foreign workers, refugees/asylum seekers) to vent frustration.
• Stereotypes reveal more about those who stereotype than about targets—sometimes express feelings of deficiency or alienation in the stereotyper’s identity.
  • Positive-sounding or “idealizing” images (e.g., white men venerating black jazz/blues/rap musicians) still constrain the Other to a set role.
  • Orientalist images (e.g., of Arab women) mix desire & disavowal.
• They create symbolic boundaries that patrol inclusion/exclusion:
  • (19^{th})-century views of Africans as “backward”.
  • White English women restricted to caring/housekeeping; barred from “higher art”.
• Political contestation can reshape stereotypes:
  • Women & Black people have partially succeeded in widening opportunity & identity.

Internalization & the Fallacies of Individualism/Essentialism

• Targets may internalize stereotypes under pressure, seeming to confirm them.
• Resistance = reclaiming self-determination.
• Individualism fallacy: exaggerating uniqueness; Essentialism fallacy: exaggerating group essence.
• Critical analysis must expose both fallacies via sociological + psychological lenses.

Historical Development of the Concept

• Term “stereotype” originally from printing technology (fixed type for repeated use).
• (19^{th})-century: metaphor for clichés/commonplaces.
• Conceptual power realized by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922 \rightarrow 1965 \text{ edition}):
  • Linked stereotypes to modernity—urban complexity, mass media, proliferating encounters with difference.

Lippmann’s Dual Dilemma of Modernity

• Modern need for informational shortcuts vs. danger of entrenched, naturalized mis-representation.
• Media (film, ads, tabloids, social media, TV news) magnify stereotype reach through accreditation.
• Lippmann personally prioritized order & stability, under-valuing critique of ideological fixation.
• Later scholarship often saw only one side:
  • Pathologizing approach ((1930s\text{--}1960s)): stereotypes = irrational, abnormal (e.g., Fascist anti-Semitism).
  • Social cognition turn normalized stereotypes as universal, cognitively necessary (in-group/out-group bias).
• Contemporary corrections:
  • Psychologists like Augoustinos & Walker emphasise power/ideology.
  • Cultural/media studies often stress ideology but neglect cognition.
  • Pickering urges a dual focus—culture and cognition—to ask: “How do we get to know ‘you’?”

Stereotypes, Inequality & Social Disadvantage

• Rapid modern change breeds uncertainty; stereotypes offer simplistic blame.
• UK example: “Chav” stereotype during austerity—attributes welfare dependence, alcohol abuse, promiscuity, vulgarity.
  • Demonizes working-class poverty as moral failing, legitimates welfare cuts.
• U.S. example: African-American male criminality stereotype in crime news.
  • Despite higher incidence of white crime, media amplify black crime, fueling fears of race-mixing and “miscegenation”.
• Inter-war Europe: “Black Shame” campaign—black colonial troops portrayed as sexual predators endangering white women (see Wigger). Reinforced racial purity ideology.
• Counter-images within black stereotypes:
  • Uncle Tom (pious servility) & Aunt Jemima (cheerful domestic servant).
  • Happy-go-lucky darky in blackface minstrelsy.
  • All variants reassure whites of a “natural” racial hierarchy.

Discursive Forms & the Role of Humour

• Stereotypes appear in serious and comic registers.
• Joking frame claims “it’s only a joke”, shielding stereotype from critique and branding the offended as humourless.
• Humour can “hard-wire” stereotypes deeper into cultural myths (Billig (2005); Lockyer & Pickering (2009); Weaver (2011)).
• Analysts must inspect form, frame, and context as well as content.

Critical Analytical Perspective & Future Research

• Study must integrate:
  1. Images & discourses themselves (public representations).
  2. Power/conflict dynamics (who benefits?).
  3. Affective bases (feelings, anxieties, desires).
• Methodological imperatives:
  • Historicize identity–representation–difference relations across contexts (sexual politics, nationalism, militarism, colonialism/post-colonialism, disability, disease, crime, etc.).
  • Recognize these relations as fluid & contingent, not fixed.
• Overarching task: untie the “tight knots” of symbolic figuration that create & sustain stereotypes.

Key Examples & Case Studies Mentioned

• Anti-Semitic stereotypes.
• Scapegoating of Travellers, foreign workers, refugees/asylum seekers.
• White fascination with black musicians (jazz, blues, rap).
• Orientalist tropes of Arab women.
• (19^{th})-century exclusion of Africans & white English women from high art.
• Successes of women’s & black civil-rights struggles in expanding opportunities.

Foundational Authors & Recommended Readings (from transcript)

• G.W. Allport – The Nature of Prejudice (1954).
• Walter Lippmann – Public Opinion (1922/1965).
• H.K. Bhabha – The Location of Culture (1994).
• Stuart Hall – “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’” in Representation (1997).
• Edward Said – Orientalism (1978).
• Richard Dyer – The Matter of Images (1993).
• Michael Pickering – Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001) and multiple encyclopedia entries (2004, 2014).
• Owen Jones – Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (2012).
• T.E. Perkins – “Rethinking Stereotypes” (1979).
• C.A. Stabile – White Victims, Black Villains (2006).
• Henri Tajfel – Human Groups and Social Categories (1981).
• I. Wigger – “Black Shame” article (2010).
• Plus works edited by Riggins (language of exclusion) and others on humour & racism.

Ethical & Practical Implications

• Stereotyping masks structural inequities, legitimizing discrimination and policy decisions (e.g., welfare cuts, policing practices).
• Critical engagement is necessary to:
  • Challenge naturalization of social hierarchies.
  • Foster openness, flexibility, tolerance in representation.
  • Balance need for cognitive economy with ethical responsibility toward complex, contingent identities.