Ideological analysis: some questions to ask of the Text/ Media

1. What are the assumptions about what is natural, just and right?

    

2. What (and who) do these assumptions distort or obscure?

    

3. What are the power relations? How are they made to appear as if they are normal or good? What negative aspects are excluded?

    

4. Look for binaries, oppositions (good/evil, natural/unnatural, tame/wild, young/old). Which term of the binary is privileged, what is repressed or devalued by this privileging of one term over the other?

    

5. What people, classes, areas of life, experiences, are 'left out', silenced?

    

6. What cultural assumptions and what 'myths' shape experience and evaluation? What is mystified (e.g. a pastoral setting for cigarette smokers, a gentle rocking chair in a lovely room for motherhood)? I use "myth", also known as "second-order signification," in the sense in which it is used by Roland Barthes: as a sign which refers to a broad, general cultural meaning; see his Mythologies. An experience or event or thing is mystified when a broad cultural meaning obscures the particulars of that experience, event or thing; this obscuring usually covers up or 'disappears' contrary or inconvenient facts, as in the examples I have given. To demystify, pay attention to the particulars, the specifics, the concrete reality, with all its blemishes and contradictions.

    

7. What enthymemes can you see in the 'logic' of the text? In a general sense, enthymemes are statements which exclude the expression of key assumptions which ground conclusions -- e.g. "Karen studies really hard. She'll ace this exam for sure" Unspoken assumption: What it takes (all it takes?) to 'ace' an examination is hard study.

    

8. How does the style of presentation contribute to the meaning of the text? Style always contains meaning.

    

9. What 'utopic kernel', that is, vision of human possibility, appears to lie at the heart of the understanding of the ideology? The assumption is that there will be some vision of the good that drives that ideological perspective's imagination of the world.