Oh is a women magazine about food, fashion, film, music art and culture.

Published by Iceland Press, a small London publisher which publishes only one other title.

• Oh Comely constructs a representation of femininity with its focus on creativity and quirkiness.
• The focus is on women as artists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians and female empowerment is a major theme.
• The absence of men as part of the representation of masculinity in Oh Comely magazine.
• Representation of social groups: Oh constructs a lifestyle through its focus on culture and the environment. This analysis would offer the opportunity to question some of the messages and values constructed by the magazine.
• Therefore it is possible to apply feminist critical thinking to this CSP for example theories of representation including
  • Hall
  • bell hooks
  • Van Zoonen
  • gender performativity – Butler

Media concentration / Conglomerates / Globalisation (in terms of media ownership)- A media conglomerate, media group, or media institution is a company that owns numerous companies involved in mass media enterprises, such as television, radio, publishing, motion pictures, theme parks, or the Internet. 

Vertical Integration-  The combination in one firm of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate firms. 

Horizontal Integration-  is the process of a company increasing production of goods or services at the same part of the supply chain 

Gatekeepers– Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some other mode of communication. 

Regulation- Rules in media. The principal targets of media regulation are the press, radio and television, but may also include film 

Deregulation- Media deregulation refers to the process of removing or loosening government restrictions on the ownership of media outlets. 

Free market- The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. 

Monopolies- A monopoly refers to when a company and its product offerings dominate a sector or industry. 

Mergers- a combination of two things, especially companies, into one.

David Hesmondhalgh– is among a range of academics who critically analyse the relationship between media work and the media industry. Wrote a book called The Cultural Industries which states ‘ the distinctive organisational form of the cultural industries has considerable implications for the conditions under which symbolic creativity is carried out’ In other words there must be serious concerns about the extent to which this business-driven, economic agenda is compatible with the quality of working life and of human well-being in the creative industries.‘

Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE

Pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

Parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

Bricolage is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (By Baker and Jane)

Intertextually is another useful term to use, as it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts.

Enigma code: the way in which intrigue and ideas are raised–which encourage an audience to want more information. Creates puzzles and questions for the audience.

Ellison and ellipsis– cut things out, movie not in real time

Flashback– to go backwards

Flash forward– to go forward

Dramatic Irony– we know something that the characters do not

Parallel narrative– 2 stories happening at the same time

Light and shade– heavy scenes and light scenes

Definitions

Pastiche- an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.

Parody- an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.

Bricolage- something constructed or created from a diverse range of things.

Intertextuality- the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.

Metanarrative- a narrative account that experiments with or explores the idea of storytelling, often by drawing attention to its own artificiality.

Hyperreality- an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality

Simulacrum- an image or representation of someone or something

Conumerist Society –  in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”.

Fragmentary Identities -presence of more than one sense of identity within a single human body.

Implosion- an instance of something collapsing violently inwards

Cultural appropriation – the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.

Reflexivity-  refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures. 

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Postmodernism can be understood as a philosophy that is characterised by concepts such as RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It’s an approach towards understanding, knowledge, life, being, art, technology, culture, sociology, philosophy, politics and history that is REFERENTIAL – in that it often refers to and often copies other things in order to understand itself.

Music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’ Shuker

If it the priority is play, then the emphasis is on the surface, in other words, if the main focus is the idea of just connecting one product to another, then the focus is superficial, shallow, lacking depth, so ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ (Strinati: 234). 

There is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need. So that ultimately there is no real value to postmodern culture other than the need for consumption. If this is the case, then it is possible to link postmodernist cultural expression with broader shifts in society, specifically around economics and politics.

Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘ (1979:7) those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on. 

SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

Specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

In other words, postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’; questioning the notion of a recognised and overarching canon of important cultural texts – book, poems, plays, films etc – much of which is institutionalised into academic syllabi.

‘The privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’ (Edward Said 1997:3)

‘We cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.’ Jacques Lacan

Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity. 

The way in which society calls / addresses / hails you is interpellation, which is the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology.

The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon. Talks about the mechanics of colonialism

As an early critical thinker of postcolonialism, Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Gramsci suggests that power relations can be understood as a hegemonic struggle through culture. In other words, Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests.

Postcolonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire – even if the Empire has gone.

Noam Chomsky indicated that ‘new forms of domination will have to be devised to ensure that privileged segments of Western industrial society maintain substantial control over global resources, human and material, and benefit disproportionately from this control.’ (cited Said, 1993:343)

Paul Gilroy is insistent that ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’ (2004:13) His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency.

As Barry notes the stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions is indeed a characteristic of postcolonial criticism. Often found by foregrounding questions of cultural difference and diversity, as well as by celebrating ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’. A unique position where ‘individuals may simultaneously belong to more than one culture – the coloniser and the colonised’. (2016:198) Even Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.

Sexism refers to the systematic ways in which men and women are brought up to view each other antagonistically, on the assumption that the male is always superior to the female‘ (1981:13).

In the social, political and economic realm, this meant demands for equal pay, equal education, equal opportunities, free contraception and abortion, greater provision for childcare and so on

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Scopophilia– taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION

Vouyerism– the sexual pleasure gained in looking

Laura Mulvey– wrote an essay ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema.’ Laura says there is an imbalance between the active male and passive female.

Fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘), the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ – ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’.

Mulvey draws on the work of 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 – ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. She also, discusses the position of the audience, categorising them as spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

In movies the dominant look is always hetero, rather than homosexual in men

3rd wave feminism- charcaterised by a rebellion against Mothers.

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Put another, it suggests that we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions

• Narrative has codes and conventions

• Narrative theory-things are based around structure

• Narratives has things in common

• Narrative has a beginning, middle and end. Doesn’t have to be chronological

• Narratives are about time and space. They are usually linear and sequential.

• Narratives are structured around a theme

• Narrative is the overall thing but the story is whats in it and the plot its how its structured

• Todorov- Tripartite narrative structure. start, middle, end. World in equilibrium

• The enticing incident- climax- revolution

• Levi Strauss- Binary oppositions

• Vladimir Propp- stock characters

• Seymour Chapman- narratives are structured around 2 things. 1) kernels (take it away story doesn’t make sense) and 2) satellites ( the little details)

Pastiche– a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. It is like a parody but instead of mocking, it celebrates

Bricolage– make something new out of other things. You might argue that new films are made with new technology, not existing film clips or video files.

Intertextuality– is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Eg Jane Austins novel was based on the movie Clueless.

Implosion- a sudden failure or collapse of an organisation or system

Cultural Appropriation- the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.