To help refresh our semiotic skills, and as a very practical help for the Y11s, we looked at and wrote in feedback on several rough cuts of Y11 music videos, viewable from the playlist below (you can also comment directly on YT and I can pass this on). I'm awaiting updated cuts at the time of writing.
Along the way, we discussed Stuart Hall's argument, plus the male gaze theory and how to formally discuss this - avoiding the trap of writing 'I applied the male gaze theory...' - by looking at two commercial examples:
1: GUNS'N ROSES' Welcome to the Jungle (1987) [video wiki]
With this video we broke down the media language behind the apparent sexism: our protagonist is clearly signified by following him and his gaze, even if the typical rule of thirds is conspicuously NOT applied in the opening shots (the huge space in the left 2/3 of the frame connoting his alienation from this 'jungle' - although he does begin more centrally framed within this fairly long take). His outsider status is neatly anchored not just by emerging from a Greyhound bus, but also by the simple, subtle small detail in the mise-en-scene of him chewing a straw - the hick stereotype!
He is given agency through cutting from extreme long shot with that uncomfortable framing to a more centrally framed medium close-up/medium tracking shot, and the very literal male gaze when we cut from his leering look at the passing woman's legs and behind to a point-of-view shot positioning the audience to empathise with him. The woman is not a full character, or person, simply legs and bum wrapped in a short, tight skirt with high heels; she is thus objectified.
Laura Mulvey's feminist concept, or critique (as her argument was that the media is deeply flawed and misogynist), of the male gaze isn't always quite so literal! She contended that media producers, male and female, whether consciously or not, have a heterosexual male audience in mind when making pre-/post-/production and media language choices, making decisions to favour their sensibilities and sexual desires. Female characters are not just commonly objectified through shots that focus on body parts and costume choices that accentuate body shape or expose flesh, but also by being rendered secondary or even inconsequential.
With so many highly successful female artists we can't easily apply a notional modified version of the Bechdel Test (asking if, in a film, there are two or more named female characters who talk to each other ... about something other than men), but we can observe the self-objectifying tendency within the bulk of the music videos of female artists.
I have looked at several dance/EDM/elctropop videos before (on musividz), and the representations within this fit the clearly observable pattern, simple enough to let it speak for itself.
3: MILEY CYRUS''s Wrecking Ball (2013)
That does, of course, take us on to the further debate of the contrasting (traditional, third wave) feminist and post-feminist stances: whilst feminists accept Mulvey's contention, post-feminists argue that we shouldn't deny women agency, and should be accepting of females' own choice to express themselves sexually. Miley Cyrus rather brutally shot down Sinead O'Connor's (an artist who suffered by refusing to bow to record labels' demands for conventional female beauty, with her shaved head!) entreaties to refuse to allow male record label bosses and directors (not least the notorious Terry Richardson, Wrecking Ball director) to exploit her. I've blogged on this previously in some detail (on musividz).
Her pop may be bubblegum (though she has swiftly moved on to psychedelic-infused weirdness), but the former Disney popette should not be dismissed as a vapid airhead*, having some very strong, clearly elucidated views that broadly come under the queer umbrella, including a rejection of gender and sexual labels. Is Wrecking Ball a sexist video? Yes and no ... there is no definitive, objective answer** to such a question, you need to explore both sides of the argument and state your own view, selecting which evidence you find most compelling.
*In contrast with the formal academic discipline of Film Studies, which more closely reflects the English (as a teaching/subject field), text-centred roots of Media curricula, Media Studies generally starts from the premise that the high culture v pop culture binary is an ideologically loaded notion, and that power and meaning can be as meaningfully explored and generated through study of what some would reject as lowbrow ephemera as work deemed 'classic' or sophisticated by some. (Note how female-centred media is generally dismissed as garbage: rom-coms, soap operas, celebrity gossip mags ...)
**Of course, those theorists who explore such fields as discourse analysis (eg Fairclough) might argue that they have delivered an objective, not subjective, critical framework that we can apply. Furthermore, such relativity as my yes or no statement could itself be taken as an indication of the postmodernist mindframe and critique, as this rejects all the -isms and sweeping grand narratives that seek to explain society ... whilst itself being one of these!
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