2. Representation Starter questions…
• How have you represented
gender in your music video?
(give some analytical details,
considering language and narrative)
• Why did you represent gender in
this way? (consider audience, genre
and narrative)
3. Representation
Question 1b:
Representation
Objective: explore the concept in
depth and apply to my own work.
4. Representation Q1b: Representation
• How are people represented work in your
video?
• How does your video construct a representation of
gender, ethnicity or age?
• You will need also to refer to some critics who
have written about representation or theories of
media representation and attempt to apply those
(or argue with them!).
• So who could you use? Mulvey, Dyer, E Ann
Kaplan, Ferguson, Hall and Foucault to name a
few.
5. Representation Representation
• Every media form, from
a home video to a
glossy magazine, is a
representation of
someone's concept of
reality, codified into a
series of signs and
symbols which can be
read (decoded) by an
audience.
• Media represents a form
or reality.
6. Representation Research question: Gender
1. What is ‘the male gaze’?
– Pick out one quote from Mulvey that sums up
the theory. (remember when you refer to a
theorists work you must state their name
followed by the year of publication)
– Who has argued against Mulvey and how?
– Pick out at least one quote that you could use
to play against Mulvey. (remember to get the
name and year)
You have 10 minutes
to prepare.
7. Representation Assessment Criteria [25]
How do you answer Explanation/analysis
the question? [10 marks]
• You need to state which project
you are using and briefly describe
it. Use of examples
• You then need to analyse it [10 marks]
(critical distance) using whichever
concept appears in the question,
making reference to relevant
theory throughout. Use of terminology
• Keep being specific in your use of [5 marks]
examples from your project. Either
apply the concept to your
production or explain how the
concept is not useful in relation to
your product.
8. Representation Applying research
• Return to the starter questions and re-
assess in light of your research.
• Write your response to the question
as part of an exam style answer.
• How have you represented gender in your
music video? (give some analytical details,
considering language and narrative)
• Why did you represent gender in this way in
your text? (consider audience, genre and
narrative. Keep critical distance)
9. Representation
Read and highlight key
arguments for and against the
‘Male Gaze’
• Check understanding
• Prepare for a representation ‘fact off’
11. Representation The Male Gaze (Mulvey 1992)
Traditional films present men as controlling
subjects and treat women as objects of desire for
men in both the story and in the audience, and do
not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in
their own right. Men do the looking; women are
there to be looked at. It was Mulvey who coined
the term 'the male gaze'.
‘pleasure in looking has been split
between active/male and
passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992).
12. Representation Essentialism: What’s wrong
with it?
• A key objection underlying many
critical responses has been that
Mulvey's argument in this paper was
(or seemed to be) essentialist: that
is, it tended to treat both
spectatorship and maleness as
homogeneous essences - as if there
were only one kind of spectator
(male) and one kind of masculinity
(heterosexual).
13. Representation Arguments against essentialism
and the male gaze
• E Ann Kaplan (1983) asked ‘Is the gaze
male?’.
• Stacey asks: ‘Do women necessarily take
up a feminine and men a masculine
spectator position?’ (Stacey 1992, 245).
• What about gay spectators?
• Richard Dyer (1982) also challenged the
idea that the male is never sexually
objectified in mainstream cinema and
argued that the male is not always the
looker in control of the gaze.
14. Representation The male? gaze
• Gender is not the only important
factor in determining what Jane
Gaines calls 'looking relations' - race
and class are also key factors
• Michel Foucault, who linked
knowledge with power, related the
'inspecting gaze' to power rather than
to gender in his discussion of
surveillance (Foucault 1977).
20. Representation Task:
Research other theorists who have written
about representation.
Present your research to the rest of the
class. Include:
– name
– date
– key quotes
– explanation of their ideas
Add all theorists to your mind map to
prepare for writing your essay.
21. Representation Representation and
Semiotics
• Reality is always represented - what we
treat as 'direct' experience is 'mediated' by
perceptual codes. Representation always
involves 'the construction of reality'.
• All texts, however 'realistic' they may seem
to be, are constructed representations
rather than simply transparent 'reflections',
recordings, transcriptions or reproductions
of a pre-existing reality.
• Representations which become familiar
through constant re-use come to feel
'natural' and unmediated.
22. Representation Postmodernism
• In a postmodern era, a great deal of our
perception of reality is mediated through
the media so reality becomes a relative
concept, judged in relation to other texts.
• What level of reality do we expect in music
videos?
• How are music videos a postmodern form
of media?
• How is authenticity created? How
important is this for your artist / label etc?
23. Representation Key questions
• What is being represented?
• How is it represented? Using what codes? Within what
genre?
• How is the representation made to seem 'true',
'commonsense' or 'natural'?
• Whose representation is it? Whose interests does it reflect?
How do you know?
• At whom is this representation targeted? How do you know?
• What does the representation mean to you? What does the
representation mean to others? How do you account for the
differences?
• How do people make sense of it? According to what codes?
• With what alternative representations could it be compared?
How does it differ?
• Why is the concept of representation problematic?
24. Representation Exam Question
• Analyse media representation in
one of your coursework
productions. [25 marks]
26. Representation Identity
• In relation to the 'cage' of identity (the key
markers of identity - Class, Age, Gender and
Ethnicity) - representation involves not only how
identities are represented (or rather constructed)
within the text but also how they are constructed in
the processes of production and reception by
people whose identities are also differentially
marked in relation to such demographic factors.
• Consider, for instance, the issue of 'the gaze'.
How do men look at images of women, women at
men, men at men and women at women?
27. Representation The ‘male gaze’
• The concept derives from a seminal
article called ‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey, a
feminist film theorist. It was published
in 1975 and is one of the most widely
cited and anthologized articles in the
whole of contemporary film theory.
28. Representation
• Mulvey argues that various features of
cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the
viewer both the voyeuristic process of
objectification of female characters and
also the narcissistic process of
identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the
screen. She declares that in patriarchal
society ‘pleasure in looking has been
split between active/male and
passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27).
29. Representation Hollywood
• This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema.
Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’
Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a
male protagonist in the narrative but also assume
a male spectator. Traditional films present men as
active, controlling subjects and treat women as
passive objects of desire for men in both the story
and in the audience, and do not allow women to be
desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Men do
the looking; women are there to be looked at. It
was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.
30. Representation Modes of looking
• Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the
film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents
in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’.
Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey
argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure
lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the
guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey
1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves ‘the
substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented
figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather
than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the
object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The
erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’. Fetishistic
looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female
image and to the cult of the female movie star. Mulvey
argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two
forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982,
45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9).
