Representation REPRESENTATION What is it? Think back to your AS exam, Section A… Remember our friend Dyer…

Representation Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone’s version of it. The media place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. This is called mediation. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when the audience gets caught up in enjoying a text. Of course, most of us are aware of this — we know that what we are seeing in a film or a Soap isn’t real — we just allow ourselves to forget for the time that the programme is on that it is a fiction. At the same time, we all have ideas in our heads of some kinds of texts which might be somehow less mediated — it is obvious that a fictional programme isn’t real, but when we encounter something like the television news, we are more likely to believe in the straightforward nature of the “truth” we are receiving.

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.

Representation REPRESENTATION How is it constructed? Think back to your AS exam, Section A… Remember our friend Dyer…

Representation Mediation. 1. Selection: Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out — any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers decided for you were less interesting, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives. 2. Organisation: The various elements will be organised carefully in ways that real life is not: in visual media this involves mise-en- scene and the organisation of narrative, in the recording of an album the production might involve re-mixing a track. Any medium you can think of will have an equivalent to these. This organisation of the material will result in … 3. Focusing: mediation always ends up with us, the audience being encouraged towards concentrating on one aspect of the text and ignoring others. If you are watching a film the camera will pan towards an important character, in a tabloid the headlines will scream, for your attention. It can be easy to ignore how different from our everyday lives this is. If you are walking through a field, you are unlikely to see a sign saying “look at this amazing tree.” You make your own decisions about what is worth your attention. The media text, through mediation, tries to do this for you.

Representation

Mediation - 3 theories. 1. The Reflective view of representing According to this view, when we represent something, we are taking its true meaning and trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our audience — like a reflection. This is the view that many people have of how news works — the news producers take the truth of news events and simply present it to us as accurately as possible. (passive audience) 2. The Intentional view This is the opposite of the Reflective idea. This time the most important thing in the process of representation is the person doing the representing — they are presenting their view of the thing they are representing and the words or images that they use mean what they intend them to mean. (passive audience) 3. The Constructionist view This is really a response to what have been seen a weakness in the other two theories —constructionists feel that a representation can never just be the truth or the version of the truth that someone wants you to hear since that is ignoring your ability as an individual to make up your own mind and the influences of the society that you live in on the way that you do so. Any representation is a mixture of: 1. The thing itself. 2. The opinions of the people doing the representation 3. The reaction of the individual to the representation 4. The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.

Representation Egypt, Sean Hannity & Jon Stewart – Fox News Fails

Representation How have you represented people? Gender Age Ethnicity Disability Consider binary oppositions, always…

Representation Representation: Gender Feminists think of the representation of people in three ways: how men look at women; how women look at themselves; how women look at each other. The assumption is that representations are always constructed from a male heterosexual point of view. In 1975, Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘male gaze’. This theory identifies several key features to explain how gender is represented in the Media: the camera lingers on the curves of the female body; events which occur to women are depicted in relation to how men react to them; women are relegated to the status of object of sexual desire; the female is often sexualized even when sexuality has nothing to do with objects or events being depicted, this is especially true of advertising. 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. Mulvey (1992) 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. MULVEY ‘ pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992).

Representation Representation: Gender 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 associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992). 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. 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. MULVEY Modes of Looking: voyeuristic or fetishtic?

Representation More Mulvey… “The Male Gaze” Women are typically the objects of gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) comes from factors such as the as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience This doesn’t necessarily change with a female target audience as we’ve been taught to think & process this way The camera acts like the man’s eyes, often lingering on the body of the woman

Representation Let’s Get This Party Started Sinnead O’Connor vs. Miley Cyrus

Representation The Open Letter “Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited,” O’Connor warns, “and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent.”

Representation The Open Letter “The music business doesn’t give a sh– about you, or any of us,” she continues. “They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think it’s what YOU wanted… None of the men oggling you give a sh– about you either, do not be fooled.”

Representation If Women Are The Target Audience Why Represent The Subject Like This?

Representation Representation: Gender 1998 – “to gaze means more than to just look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.” Jonathon SCHROEDER So, how have you represented GENDER in your production work?

Representation ‘Male Gaze’: a flawed concept? A key objection underlying many critical responses has been that Mulvey's argument in this paper was 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).

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). 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. KAPLAN, STACEY, DYER???

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 (1977). GAINES. FOUCAULT.

Representation Assessment Criteria [25] How do you answer the question? You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it. You then need to analyse it (critical distance) using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout. Keep being specific in your use of examples from your project. Either apply the concept to your production or explain how the concept is not useful in relation to your product. Explanation/analysis [10 marks] Use of examples [10 marks] Use of terminology [5 marks]

Representation Exam Question Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions. [25 marks]