-Happens at a structural and textual level

Toril Moi’s set of definitions:

Feminist- a political position

Feminine- culturally defined characteristics

Female- a matter of biology

Laura Mulvey

She wrote an essay called ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’

She talks about the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.

‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female‘

Female representations are constructed around male ideology

Scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ )- Natural pleasure in looking

fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘)

Jacques Lacan

This mirror moment- highlighting the parallel between the ‘mirror stage’ of child development and the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen (the first time you see yourself in a mirror and recognise the reflection as yourself)

Laura Mulvey uses this theory to suggest that when we watch other people in the media and recognise them as something like our self ‘a complex process of likeness and difference

Raunch culture

Raunch culture is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘

exploitation vs empowerment 

Intersectionality: Queer theory

Butler suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural a set of categories to be played out and performed by individual subjects in individual moments in time and space

Van Zoonen and Hook

Lisbet Van Zoonen highlights the idea that the concept of ‘woman’ is not a homogenous, collective noun. That students need to be aware of the differences between women, that ‘gender is not the defining quality alone for women, and intersects with race, sexuality and class.’ 

Bell hook advocates media literacy, the need to engage with popular culture to understand class struggle, domination, renegotiation and revolution

THERE IS a difference between

• masculine: a representation of cultural traits attached to the idea of “men”, e.g. masculinity
• male: a matter of literal representation of men

and

• feminine: a representation of cultural traits attached to the idea of “women”, e.g. femininity
• female: a matter of literal representation of women

Toril Moi (1987)

Toril divided these into categories:

• feminist: a political opinion
• female: a matter of biology
• feminine: a set of culturally defined characteristics

Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

• visual pleasure, the signs of visual pleasure

• the male gaze

• women is seen as “image” and the man as “the bearer of the look”
• therefore, “looking” is a male priority, with their priority being the sexualisation of the female form
• there is a world of imbalanced power
• the pleasure in looking is split between the active male and the passive female
• there is no true female representation because female characters are designed around the male gaze
• mulvey draws on freudian psychology, the concept of scopophilia (a pleasure of looking).
• fetishism (freudian), to cut up parts and only use certain parts
• the fetishism of women is using only parts that are sexualised
• systemic sexism

*Jacques L’ecain

• there is a moment in child development where you finally understand that you are a person
• there is a moment where we see ourselves in the mirror and recognise that it is us
• L’ecain recognises that we never see ourself, only a mirror image of ourselves.

Mulvey combines L’ecain’s theory of self recognition with the media to create a theory of representation in the media. The idea of cinema for Mulvey is that you see someone on a screen and that helps you to form an idea of identity. This concretes ideas in our mind

Gender Representation

• breaking down the idea of gender

• gender roles

gender roles are the stereotypical actions assigned to gender. For example, women are “carers” and men “earn a living”

Ariel Levy: Raunch Culture

engaging with the male gaze for your own benefit for the need of your own power (reclaiming the male gaze)

• performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality
• This could be done for profit (to make a living), for example, sex workers

Third and 4th wave feminism

• 1st “we want the female vote”
• 2nd all images of female bad
• 3rd and 4th intertextuality – intersection of experience that women need to account for

Judith Butler

• gender is performed (acting that is crucial to the gender we are)
• gender is a social construct:

If male equals “having masculine traits” and female equals “having feminine traits”, what are gendered traits? if you possess feminine traits but are seen in society as male, the idea of gender breaks down. Therefore it is evident that gender is merely a social construct.

Bell Hooks: Cultural Criticism and

• popular culture has power as it serves as a popular medium for those who want to understand politics

institutional sexism

• Bombshell (accounts of women at Fox News, US News corporation owned by Rupert Murdoch, exposing Roger Ailes as a sexual harasser)

jean killbourne (TED talk)

• 1960s systematic sexism through advertising which still occurs today
• 2nd wave feminism: equality for women (in jobs for example)
• “the influence of advertising is quick, effective and subconscious”
• postcolonialism: whitewashing in women (intersectionality)
• men and women “inhabit two different worlds”: when women are objectified they are always living in a “world of danger”
• objectification of women has an add-on effect on young girls where young children are taught to sexualise at a young age
• “sex sells”, and has become more graphic today which puts more women at risk due to harmful stereotypes
• women and girls are taught to be “sexually available”, and to see themselves as “sexual objects”
• objectification leads to violence due to normalisation of dangerous attitudes
• “we must think as ourselves as consumers rather than citizens”

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to CSP “Ghost Town” and “Letter to the Free” in your answer.

Narrative in a music video is important because it brings structure and meaning and a story to the video. Todorov said how each narrative should follow a structure of equilibrium, disruption and then new equilibrium. This just gives the narrative story excitement and meaning. Vladimir Propp talks about how each story has 7 different character types which correspond to the story. Lastly Lev Strauss binary opposites and how in narrative there are binary opposites within the characters.

Looking at the music video ghost town, it has an equilibrium, disruption and a new equilibrium. It starts with the band driving along the road, set in east London, giving off a ghostly atmosphere. The middle shows the band suddenly drive out of control, representing the employment state, and how it has become a large problem, as unemployment rates in the UK were rising significantly. For the end of the music video, it shows the band throwing rocks along the water on the beach, representing the calmness that has been resonated, and how everything has returned back to normal, suggesting the economic state has retuned back to normal.

For letter to the free, the equilibrium would be the man playing the drums on his own at the beginning, the disruption would then be everyone else joining in, and then the new equilibrium would be the man singing and playing the piano on his own.

Linking back to the question, narrative is useful when analyzing music videos, as it allows the audience to capture the perceptions and messages. As using just a speaker to convey a message can be difficult, so applying narrative to music videos is important.