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We have briefly traced some of the challenges and gains made by women in the past 50 years. Why frame a study focused on media representations in this manner? Because representation can have life or death stakes. For example, would you be able to tell if someone were drowning? Retired U.S. Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vittone (2013) wryly notes, “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life” (para. 2). If people only learn to recognize drowning from televisual misrepresentations, as a society we risk placing people in dire danger. Similarly, we do not equip non-experts to recognize the symptoms of a heart attack. Corliss (2017) explains, “People sometimes describe heart attack symptoms as chest discomfort or pressure, while others say they feel an intense, crushing sensation or a deep ache similar to a toothache” (para. 3). Real heart attacks may occur as depicted in fictional narratives—as dramatic pain radiating from the chest down the left arm—but many individuals do not share these symptoms. This limited representation has the potential to cost someone their life. Representations can be very serious indeed.

Representations also affect what people imagine as ideal. Pollan (1998) documents how McDonald’s aesthetic demands for picturesque, uniform French fries led them to purchase almost exclusively Russet Burbank potatoes. Unfortunately, these potatoes are prone to net necrosis. Pollan explains that to overcome this purely cosmetic defect, farmers “must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use” (para. 51). Farmers avoid their fields for days after spraying and must tent harvested potatoes to off-gas prior to shipment. The desire for a reproduction of the image of a perfect fry, long and golden without lines or spots, superseded concerns about consumers’ or suppliers’ health, environmental ramifications, or nutritional content (granted, this might be asking a lot of a fast food item). This image created real-world demand and grave effects. Representations of an ideal can supersede what it signifies.

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Representations may even be indistinguishable from that which they represent. Magritte’s wry, surreal paintings such as “The Treachery of Images” (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) and “Not to be Reproduced” emphasize the futility of reproductions and symbols to capture truth. He critiqued representation almost 100 years ago, but these paintings eerily presage the contemporary world. In digital spaces, for example, representation is the same as the real. How are the words from one’s lips more “real” than those one types into a phone? Indeed, sometimes the image or representation might be more “real” than the “real” thing. For example, take Barthes’s (1977) discussion of Italianicity. When U.S. American students are asked to depict “Italy,” they frequently and consistently draw from marketing imagery of marinara sauce, pasta, and pizza. Students who have travelled to Italy often disclose that they have been disappointed to find it is not “Italian” enough! In this manner, the image supplants the real.

Baudrillard (1994b) saw this implosion coming. Drawing on the ancient Epicureans’ concept of the simulacra, he theorized how the copy and the real implode in hyperreality, which typifies our contemporary symbolic landscape. When the sign/signifier are coterminous and inextricably intermingled, the representation and the real become indistinguishable. We recirculate symbols, images, and ideas. Signs do not refer only to signifiers; as Baudrillard (1994a) posits, they gesture, over and over, to other signs until their point of origin ceases to matter. Meaning emerges from the circulation and reproduction of ideas and images, such that the presentation and the representation are the same.

This collapse of the symbol and its referent animates much of our communication in contemporary contexts, and symbols and stories affect our understanding of the world and visions for the future. Rhetoric is energy. It has the capacity to move others, via purposeful persuasion, constitutive creation, or epistemological shifts of how people understand, navigate, and imagine the world. Thus, engaging with fictional and speculative narratives hardly can be divorced from analyzing the “real” world. It is the real world, and it helps us to think, to envision, and to act in new ways in fictional, digital, and material contexts. In other words, if symbols constitute reality and make possibilities and ideals legible, then to understand reality, now and for the future, we must study representations.