Section A: Representation Lesson 2

What are the signifiers here?

What do they signify?

Section A: Representation Lesson 2

What are the

signifiers here?

What do they

signify?

Section A: Representation Lesson 2

What is denoted in this video? http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3y9llDXuM

What are the connotations?

Today we will look at three more theories of representation…

1. Dyer and Stereotypes 2. Mulvey and ‘Gaze’ Theory 3. Baudrillard and Hyper reality

You will be given ten minutes in your theory group to understand the material and to prepare for feedback.

You will not be allowed to take the notes away and can only write 50 words in notes so work wisely.

Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and the Male Gaze

• Mulvey is a feminist film scholar.• ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975).• Analysed Hollywood cinema and argued that female

characters were represented as passive objects of male sexual desire.

• The male gaze – male characters are ‘the bearers of the look’ which is usually aimed at physically desirable, sexually submissive female characters.

• Mulvey argues spectators watch films through the eyes of the male characters.

Mulvey

• Scopophilia – pleasure in looking.• Cinema offers voyeuristic pleasures – visual

pleasures.• Male scopophilic desires satisfied.• Women connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.• Men look, women are looked at.• Object/subject.

• Mulvey identifies three ways of looking associated with cinema:– The look of the camera that records the film– The look of the audience that views the film– The look of the characters in the film

• The first two looks are invisible in classical narrative cinema meaning that the only visible look is is that of the characters.

Mulvey

Criticisms of Mulvey• Theoretical not empirical model.• Focuses on heterosexual male spectators.• Assumes mass audience responding to a text in a uniform way.• Neglects possibility of male providing visual pleasure.• Mary Ann Doane – ‘the masquerade’. Flaunting a flamboyant femininity is

an empowering position.• Kathleen Rowe argues that being the object of the gaze is a position of

power.• Richard Dyer questions the association of looking (subject of the gaze)

with being active, and being looked at (object of the gaze) as being passive.

• Ann Kaplan argues women can possess the look and make men the object of the gaze. However this is simply a reversal of roles in which the positions are still defined by dominance and submission. The gaze is not necessarily male, but is masculine.

Richard Dyer and the Representation of Men

• Dyer draws on Mulvey’s work to argue that ways of looking reassert male dominance.

• He suggests that images of men aimed at women undermine those codes.

• When men are objectified they will attempt to resist the gaze of the camera – they may look away, close their eyes, wear sunglasses, look aggressive. They may be doing something, i.e. being active not just posing.

Analysing Representation

• Dyer identifies four questions to ask of a representation:– How is it re-presenting the world to us (through

technical codes)?– What does it suggest is typical and what is not?– Who is speaking? For whom?– What is represented to us? Why?

Stereotypes

• Media representations often use stereotypes as a cultural shorthand.

• Dyer argues stereotypes are a way of reinforcing differences between people, and representing these differences as natural.

• For example stereotypes about men and women reinforce the idea that they are very different.

Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra

• Baudrillard is a postmodern theorist.• He argues our society has become so reliant on

representations that we have lost contact with the real.• We can no longer tell the real from the artificial.• Reality is determined by representation.• There is no distinction between reality and

representation, only the simulacrum.• Simulacrum – a copy that now has more reality than

the object it is a copy of.

Baudrillard

• For Baudrillard the entire concept of representation is problematic.

• Media representations are simulations of realities that do not exist.

• They are hyperreal.

Representation Key Ideas so far

Saussure Signifier + Signified = Sign

Barthes Denotation and Connotation

Hall Giving meaning to what is depicted

Mulvey Male Gaze

Doane Masquerade

Dyer Stereotypes

Baudrillard Simulacrum

Choose one of these theories and transform it into a picture to summarise your understanding.