Theoretical Approaches


Theoretical approaches related to identity, in particular, to ‘British Asian’ as a collective term

REPRESENTATION
  • David Buckingham: "What are the social implications of media representations?  The media do not just offer us a transparent 'window on the world', they offer us a mediated version of the world. They do not just present reality, they re-present it." 
  • Julie D’Acci: ‘It is through representational or signifying systems such as language, photography, film and television that the categories that seem so natural to us and the differences that organise out thinking and our lives (like masculinity and femininity, male and female) actually get determined’ (Defining Women, 1994)
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM & STEREOTYPING
  • Richard Dyer (1979): "Stereotypes are about power. Those with power stereotype those with less power." "The ideological work of stereotyping involves closing down the range of possible meanings, making fast, firm, and separate what is in reality fluid."
  • Stuart Hall (1981)  proposes that there are three kinds of representation of black people – the native, the entertainer and the social problem. Hall proposes that meaning is made by the reader, that is, through a preferred, negociated or oppositional reading.
  • Alvarado et al (1987) argue that there are four main categories of race representation in the media: The exotic, the dangerous, the humorous and the pitied 
  • What are stereotypes? According to Walter Lippmann in 1922, stereotypes had four major characteristics: they were an ordering process; a short cut; referred to the ‘real world’; and expressed our ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’. Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that people employ to make sense of their lives and their group affiliations.
  • Alison Griffiths sees stereotypes as rigid, simplistic, overdetermined and inherently false…they misrepresent people’s ‘lived identities’ by falling back upon narrowly conceived preconceptions of racial, cultural and gendered difference, thus perpetuating myths about social, cultural and racial groups.
  • Michel Foucault takes a more active view of audiences: rather than viewers coming to the television screen with already-formed identities, television genres actually help to inform the identity in question.




Erving Goffman and Performance The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959


Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish 1975

Roland Barthes Semiotics


TRENDS

  • CONSUMERS AS PRODUCERS Hugh Mackay (The Open University) describes the web as a stage where anyone can perform nuanced aspects of 'the nation'. Where this becomes particularly interesting is in the diaspora communities: the web now offeres a place where people who have left a physical location can gather to experience a sense of national belonging. They can access the same cultural touchpoints as people in residence, from local news to comedy, and can engage in the same debates. the web allows for the expression of the diversity of the UK.
  • Michael Wesch Digital Ethnography (2007) consumers as producers
  • Sathnam Sangheera (The Times 10.01.2011) reports reactions about "the barrage of generalizations" about attitudes of Asian males towards women: British Sikhs and Hindus have contacted him to distance themselves from the contoversy, proposing letter-writing campaigns objecting to the use of the word 'Asian' where 'Pakistani' would be more accurate. He noted anti-Muslim comments on internet discussion boards and received texts from contacts asking him to voice the opinion that 'It's a Pakistani not an Asian problem." Sangheera asserts that few demographic groups are more stereotyped already than Asian males.
  • Andrew Norfolk (The Times 09.05.2012) Headline: A Nation's Shame reports successful conviction of Rochdale Nine for sex trafficking British children and the 'failure of duty' by Greater Manchester Police, Crown Prosecution Service and Rochdale social services. The Chief Crown prosecutor now states that "imported cultural baggage" defined the attitudes of the convicted men. Evidence about the sex-grooming network was presented to police in August 2008 but the authorities failed to act; the Chief Constable now says that the force had "learnt an awful lot since 2008."
  • Mohammed Shafiq CEO Ramadhan Foundation, Rochdale (The Times 09.05.2012)"There has been an increase of people speaking out against such men.Five years ago it was very different: I was threatened with violence because some people thought that by speaking out, I was doing the work of the far Right. How things have changed. The bad news is that there is a generational split. Our community leaders say they have no responsibility to tackle the issue.The difference in attitude between our younger and older generatiins presents a continuing challenge."
  • Baroness Warsi (The Times 19.05.2012) states that her father demanded that she urged her to speak out. Arriving from a Punjab village and working double shifts in a rag mill, he encouraged his five daughters to embrace the best of their Pakistani heritage and British culture. She asserts that the sex grooming crimes against vulnerable young girls that led to nine successful convictions in May 2012 have a connection with the Asian cultural identity of the abusers: "There is a small minority of who see women as second-class citizens and white women as third-class. Some Pakistani men see white girls as fair game. We have to be prepared to say that." It took years for the authorities to act and for the many cases to come to court in a collective trial. In the future, Warsi believes that cultural sensitivities will be less of a bar to applying the law.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO FRAME DISCUSSIONS ABOUT YOUR PRODUCTIONS 

    SEXISM & STEREOTYPING
    • John Berger Ways of Seeing In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series,John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47). Berger argues that in European art from the Renaissance onwards women were depicted as being ‘aware of being seen by a [male] spectator’ (ibid., 49), Berger adds that at least from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to ‘the owner of both woman and painting’ (ibid., 52). He noted that ‘almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it’ (ibid., 56). He advanced the idea that the realistic, ‘highly tactile’ depiction of things in oil paintings and later in colour photography (in particular where they were portrayed as ‘within touching distance’), represented a desire to possess the things (or the lifestyle) depicted (ibid., 83ff). This also applied to women depicted in this way (ibid., 92). Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (ibid., 64). In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’ adding that ‘it could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41). Such ads ‘appear to imply a male point of view, even though the intended viewer is often a woman. So the women who look at these ads are being invited to identify both with the person being viewed and with an implicit, opposite-sex viewer’ (ibid., 44).
      We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white.
      Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus 1651
    • Laura Mulvey investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. Central to Mulvey's writings is the position of women in relation to patriarchal myth. Mulvey makes use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory to argue 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. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive 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. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.
    • However, gender is not the only important factor in determining what Jane Gaines calls 'looking relations' - raceand class are also key factors (Lutz & Collins 1994, 365; Gaines 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Tagg 1988; Traube 1992). Ethnicity was found to be a key factor in differentiating amongst different groups of women viewers in a study of Women Viewing Violence (Schlesinger et al. 1992). Michel Foucault, who linked knowledge with power, related the 'inspecting gaze' to power rather than to gender in his discussion of surveillance (Foucault 1977). From Notes on The Gaze, Daniel Chandler
      • Watch the video here
    •  Alison Bechdel devisedThe Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule, which is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For, in a 1985 strip called The Rule. 

    NARRATIVE

    AUDIENCE
    • How to describe your target audience: mainstream, niche; how to segment your audience using GEARS to define them 
      (gender, ethnicity, age, region / nationality, socio-economic group). It is therefore appropriate to talk about different audiences, rather than one audience.
    •  Audiences: passive or autonomous? 'Effects' model v. 'Uses and Gratifications' model
       

     
















    • Maslow's hierarchy of needs
    • Young and Rubicam's 4Cs model
    has clear links with Maslowe and acknowledges the global nature of media audiences and divides the audience into 7 different types of consumer, the main categories are from MARS (mainstreamers, aspirers, reformers, succeeders). It takes the following as consumer motivations: security, control, status, individuality, freedom, survival and escape.
    • Adorno and the culture 'industry' For Theodore Adorno,  advertising creates false needs. Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a 'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic. 
      Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually questionsocial life. 
      False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.
      Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again. 
      • Katz and Lazarsfeld assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests messages from the media move in two distinct ways. First, individuals who are opinion leaders, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content. The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience, but is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a more passive audience. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.This theory appeared to reduce the power of the media, and some researchers concluded that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpret texts. This led to the idea of active audiences. 

    • Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies

      RECEPTION THEORY focuses on the scope in textual analysis for 'negotiation' and 'opposition' on the part of the audience. This means that a text ( a book, film, advert, poster or other creative work) is not passively accepted by the audience but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the texts based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. 

      Stuart Hall’s encoding decoding model; dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings; why Hall says he studies culture instead of media specifically, and media hegemony. Audiences are no longer considered passive recipients.

    MUSIC VIDEO 
    Andrew Goodwin Dancing In The Distraction Factory: offers a framework for analysing the key codes & conventions of music video

    ·     Genre characteristics

    ·     Relationship between visuals & lyrics (illustrate, amplify, disjuncture) Visuals 

    ·     Relationship between visuals & music (Cutting to the beat)

    ·     Lip synching (authenticates performance)and CUs on performer’s hands playing instruments

    ·     Notions of looking (screens)
          Intertextuality (Bond brand; superheroes Marvel comics; meme [Gangnam & Harlem Shake])

    ·     * Fij only: we made a music video for an unsigned solo artist who will build his audience and distribute his music through social network sites and word of mouth; as a free agent, he has no label to tell him what he can and cannot do in terms of creating and projecting an image or ‘star brand’.


    Richard Dyer Stars proposes that: 
     A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines, films, music videos).Their image often contains a USP

    http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/Music/music.php?pageID=popstar


    Dick Hebdige & subcultures

    Roland Barthes –semiotics


    Michael Wesch Digital Ethnography 2007

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