2. Objectives for RipTide
■ To understand the processes through which meanings are
established through intertextuality
■ To analyse how audiences respond to this aspect of media language
■ To analyse the way meaning is created through micro elements
■ To know the codes and conventions of music video and how genre develops over time
■ To explore the significance of challenging or subverting genre conventions
MEDIA LANGUAGE:
REPRESENTATION:
■ To analyse the way media constructs versions of reality
■ To explore how and why stereotypes can be used positively and negatively
■ To analyse how media representations convey values, attitudes, and beliefs
about the world
■ How the audience are positioned by the music video
Van Zoonen: Feminist theory
Roland Barthes: Semiotics
David Gauntlett: Identity theory
Claude Levi-Strauss: Structuralism
TzvetanTodorov: Narratology
Andrew Goodwin: Genre theory
Steve Neal: Genre theory
3. LiesbetVan Zoonen
■ Believes we get our ideas about gender from the media.
■ The media represent women with stereotypical images and this behaviour reinforces concepts of what it
means to be a woman.The media does this because they believe it reflects dominant social values and
male producers are influenced by this, leading to a patriarchal society.
■ The display of women’s bodies as objects to be looked at is a core element of western patriarchal society
■ Before the advent of the women’s movement these gender stereotypes seemed natural, or “given”. Few
questioned how they developed, how they were reinforced, or how they were maintained.
■ However, media texts are polysemic and construct diverging and sometimes conflicting articulations of
femininity
■ Argues that audiences are active and have negotiated readings of texts, as well as an understanding of
the way meanings are encoded and decoded
■ The underlying frame of reference is that women belong to the family and domestic life, and men to the
social world of politics and work; that femininity is about care, nurturance and compassion, and that
masculinity is about efficiency, rationality, and individuality.
4.
5.
6. Laura Mulvey:The Male Gaze
■ Mulvey wrote this theory in 1975
■ The idea that women appear on camera for the visual pleasure of the male
audience
■ We constantly see these representations of women as so they become normal,
thus supporting a patriarchal society whereby women are oppressed and men
are dominant
■ Many Hollywood films objectify women with the camera offering the audience
a voyeuristic look at the female body
■ Women are gazed upon because heterosexual men are assumed to be the
audience for most film genres
7.
8.
9. ApplyingVan Zoonen & Mulvey
■ Women in the video are repeatedly presented as an object to be watched
■ Women are the victims of violence, and are helpless
■ Women are headless
■ However, are we really positioned to view these violent acts as pleasurable?
■ Are they always helpless?
10. David Gauntlett
■ …audiences often get a sense of their own identity from the media products they
consume
■ …in the past the media promoted simple stereotypical representations of gender e.g.
men as breadwinner, strong, women as housewives and mothers.
■ …believes that in newer media products we get a diverse complex representation that
have moved away from the binary gender representations of the past.
■ …representations today can be diverse, complex and sometimes challenging,
particularly when looking at gender.
11. Violence
■ How are violence and sexual desire
represented in Un Chien Andalou?
■ How does this inform our
understanding of RipTide?
■ How is violence towards women
represented?
■ How is sexual desire represented?
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19. ApplyingVan Zoonen to Riptide
■ Do these images of women offer a sexualised representation
for the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience, or are they
presented in a way that challenges the sexualisation of
women in many music videos?
■ How is the concept of beauty represented?
■ Is there an argument that the video is being ironic or
contradictory in these representations?
20.
21. ■ Explore how gender is represented in the Riptide music video from your set texts [15]
