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Mainstreaming (Media Studies)
The process of creating mass audience awareness about previously underrepresented groups through media messages. Individuals and groups seek mainstreaming to voice messages about their representation in the mainstream media as well as to heighten public awareness about their cause. Mainstreaming is thus a means for improving visibility in mass media messages, which historically perpetuates the dominant social, political, and economic ideologies. Moreover, media messages reinforce notions of acceptability for members of the majority culture and either slight or construct demeaning representations of minority groups. A difficulty with mainstreaming, as critics charge, is that media messages may be constructed that reinforce the problematic stereotypes of the individuals and groups while they are attempting to mainstream, rather than offering new meanings; this corresponds to the notion of ...