Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Key Issues
Analysis Wider issues of representation Wider issues of identity Use of theory
Case studies
Cover two media Past and present/ contemporary (last few years) Focus on a specific representation
e.g. youth/ gender
How does it represent youth/ gender? How do audiences respond to these representations? What are the effects of these representations?
Key questions
1. How do the contemporary media represent nations, regions and ethnic / social / collective groups of people in different ways? How does contemporary representation compare to previous time periods? What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people? To what extent is human identity increasingly mediated? How do your texts represent a specific group? What themes/ narratives/ discourses are constructed for this group? Compare your text to past texts in terms of question 1. What effect do these representations have on the audience? What effect do they have on society? Is media increasingly important in the way we understand our own identity and the identity of others?
2. 3.
4.
Collective Identity
There are two separate but related issues in this exam:
How are groups of people represented? How are these representations constructed? How do these representations impact upon our sense of identity? How do audiences use these representations to create/ understand their identity?
Identity
Is identity something we construct or something we discover? Is identity something we share with others? How do media texts impact on our sense of identity? Is identity fixed or does it change? Is identity something we are or something we do?
David Gauntlett
Identities are not given but are constructed and negotiated.
Laura Mulvey
The Male Gaze
Michel Maffesoli
The Time of Tribes
Mikhail Bakhtin
the unfinalised self
Judith Butler
Gender is what you do, not what you are.
Antonio Gramsci
Hegemony/ shifting nature of dominant ideology
Angela McRobbie
a kind of false sisterhood that assumes a common definition of womanhood or girlhood
Janice Winship
The gaze between cover model and women readers marks the complicity between women seeing themselves in the image masculine culture has defined. a magazine is like a club. Its first function is to provide readers with a comfortable sense of community and pride in their identity
Paul Messaris
Female models addressed to women appear to imply a male point of view.
Learn a few quotes/ applicable ideas from relevant theorists/ critics Ensure you can apply and comment on/ evaluate/ criticise the theories/ reports Ensure you can answer the four key questions on an earlier slide
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin agreed individual people cannot be finalised, completely understood, known, or labelled. He saw identity as the unfinalised self, meaning a person is never fully revealed or known. Many icons of the postmodern age change and adapt their identity and consequently can be seen in these terms: Marilyn Mansons manipulations of traditional binary oppositions such as male/ female, beauty/ grotesque; Lady Gagas manipulations of femininity; or Madonnas consistent reinventions of herself can all be seen as examples of the unfinalisable self.
From Media Magazine April 2010