This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as 'systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized 'Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

Table of Contents

The Work of Representation - Stuart Hall Representing the Social - Peter Hamilton France and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography The Poetics and Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures - Henrietta Lidchi The Spectacle of the 'Other' - Stuart Hall Exhibiting Masculinity - Sean Nixon Genre and Gender - Christine Gledhill The Case of Soap Opera