Tropes

Tropes are rhetorical devices or units of metaphor. They are gendered in the same ways that other forms of human communication are gendered. Dominant communicative categories are verbal and nonverbal, visual and aural, and are evident in all parts of the world. Tropes in a gendered sense can be seen as culturally determined narratives, visual stereotypes, and aural gestures, and they are commonly understood as mechanisms to deliver meaning in literature, film and television, and music. This entry reviews the historical framework from which Western culture has historically used tropes and reflects on their uses and ubiquity in a gendered and mediated sense.

Tropes began as mechanisms in music, as texts added to the Catholic liturgy attaching literary meanings and images to established components of the Mass, dating back to the 10th century. Over time, these were performed as independent dramas. Tropes as gendered images have a complex history, the language of their connection being complicated by the use of gendered imagery throughout recorded human history and the concept of the trope being tied to the study of literary traditions. The concept of trope is heavily tied to genre; indeed, genres are fre-quendy demonstrated through the use of characteristic tropes. The use of a trope within any narrative locates that narrative within a cultural framing that contextualizes any individual or specific meanings [Page 400]that may be generated by that text's creator/composer. Studies of semiotic, or nonverbal, communication systems (according to Hay den White) view tropes as a mechanism for understanding the different forms of linguistic/articulated and visual communication modes in terms of the cultural conceptions each set of images expresses through such mechanisms as metaphor, synecdoche, irony, and metonymy.

In traditional media such as storytelling, gender tropes dominate folklore and fairy tales. Classic images of the “hero,” “damsel in distress,” “evil stepmother,” and helper categories of “fairy godmother” and “seven dwarfs” are juxtaposed with tropes of storytelling, such as “the quest,” with devices that represent cultural norms, such as the poisoned apple of Snow White, naming the villain such as Rumpelstiltskin, and so on. Such images have been transformed over time to reflect shifting cultural norms and have transferred to newer modes of media transmission, beginning with Eleanor of Aquitaine in 13th-century France and going on to Sir Thomas Malory's depiction of the Arthurian legends, the Grimm brothers' collection of 19th-century Germanic fairy tales, and the Disney Studios' transformation of these into representations shown in contemporary media.

As a mechanism of contemporary media, tropes are utilized in a variety of ways to depict both cultural norms and transgressive images of gendered action, behavior, and being. War, historically troped with masculine imagery, is an early entry in the arena of electronic media representation, particularly in film reels of World War I beginning in 1914. Within the past century, film and recorded sound have expanded the scope whereby tropes are applied, enmeshing tropes even further into genres of mediated representation—to the point where tropes have become inseparable from genres. As in all types of gendered language use, gendered tropes represent cultural values and norms, making them fundamental to especially visual forms of communication. Cultural stereotypes of gender as metaphors of positive and negative human behavior are clearly presented in film and television as well as displayed in all forms of advertising. Tropes such as bisexuality, while in themselves not dominant tropes of discourse or representation, when they do appear are used to critique mainstream representations of gender and sexuality, as for example in the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain.

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