Att föra någon annans talan : en bildanalys om välgörenhetsorganisationers framställning av kvinnor i tredje världen

The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge about the extent to which non-governmental charity organizations can influence the western societies’ view of mankind through videos. Three videos from three international charities have been chosen for this study. To answer the questions of this essay, a semiotic picture analysis will be used as well as a post-colonial theory with Spivak as its foundation. The first question the essay aims to answer is how the charities UNICEF, UNHCR and Oxfam within their line of work represent women in the Third World and the second question is how the effect of this representation looks like in the light of the essay’s post-colonial theory. The study shows that the charities through their videos depict Third World women as helpless victims. The effect of this depiction has meant that Third World women have been diminished by displaying them as a large homogeneous group of victims, that they have been made non-independent by not being able to speak for themselves and that they have been viewed as low standing in a worldly hierarchy. The conclusion of this essay is that through the charities’ representations of Third World women as victims, colonial stereotypes have been recreated. Which in the end results in an unwanted effect of the representation, and that charity organizations should affirm their work in a post-colonial perspective