Jhally, Sut

Satvider “Sut” Jhally (1955–) is professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is the founder of the Media Education Foundation. He is known for his research, publications, and films on gender, race, and identity construction through the advertising and public media.

Jhally was born in Kenya, raised and educated in England at the University of York, and moved to Canada, where he earned both his second master's degree and his Ph.D. in communications. In 1985, he became a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in 1991 he founded the Media Education Foundation (MEF), an organization of which he became the executive director. Jhally has focused his career on media criticism and the construction of identity—gendered, racial, sexual, and national—as it is presented through popular culture and the media. Much of his work began as material to use in his own classes at the University of Massachusetts, yet his impact has stretched beyond that to engage with scholars specializing in a multitude of foci in gender and identity construction.

Known as a third wave gender scholar, Sut Jhally is known as an expert on cultural studies, advertising, media, and consumption.

(Wikimedia/Chris Moriarty)

Jhally's early publications focus specifically on advertising, grounded in semiotic analysis and particularly the work of Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson, and notably Erving Goffman. Goffman became a mainstay of Jhally's theoretical framework in later work; Jhally was interested in both Goffman's work in his 1979 Gender Advertisements, an analysis of advertising, and Goffman's lifelong focus on the performativity of meaning. This sociological approach is based in the symbolic interactionist school, which articulates an approach to the study of individual/institutional interaction from the perspective that individuals create meaning from the events they see and in which they participate. Jhally's own first monograph, published in 1987, takes his concern with advertising as one of understanding the relationship between culture and economy. This interaction brings in what would become his increasing concern for media as a locus for representing popular culture within Western societies.

As Jhally's work at the Media Education Foundation progressed through the 1990s, he produced, and frequently wrote and directed, documentaries with other media scholars analyzing the construction of meaning in advertising. The analysis of gender became the clear focus of this work in the Dreamworlds films produced in 1990, 1995, and 2007. Two films, Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession With Thinness (1995) and Red Moon: Menstruation, Culture and the Politics of Gender (2009), are part of MEF's media and health series of documentaries, many of which focus on the impact of gender construction on health issues as related to self-image, the stigma attached to menstruation, eating disorders, and the impact of tobacco and alcohol advertising on both men and women. In the films Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women III (2000) and IV (2010, both with gender scholar Jean Kilbourne) and The Codes of Gender: Identity + Performance in Pop Culture (2009), Jhally as the driving force addresses the representations of women in media, specifically advertising, music videos, and film. He is equally concerned with the construction of sexuality in the films Off the Straight and Narrow (1998) and Further Off the Straight and Narrow (2006), both concerning the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual/transgender (GLBT) community, as well as gender constructions that work against social and cultural norms in the film Playing Unfair: The Media Image of the Female Athlete (2002). Both of these issues are also undercurrents throughout his films addressing gender constructions.

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