Representation:
Definition:
"
rep·re·sen·ta·tion
[rep-ri-zen-tey-shuhn, -zuhn-] Show IPAnoun1.the act of representing.2.the state of being represented.3.the expression or designation by some term, character,symbol, or the like.4.action or speech on behalf of a person, group, businesshouse, state, or the like by an agent, deputy, orrepresentative.5.the state or fact of being so represented: to demandrepresentation on a board of directors."
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Key Points:
* Representation is the re-presentation of people, place or events by the media.
* This process is a construction it is not a window on the world.
* It allows us to imagine particular groups and see groups of people in certain ways.
* This can affect how these groups experience the world and get understood by others.
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Questions of Representations:
1. Who is being represented?
2. How are they being represented?
3. Why was this representation chosen?
4. Does the audience require any previous understanding?
5. In analyzing representations we usually place them into groups - Class, Age, Gender, Ethnicity,
religion etc.
6. Representations can be both positive and negative.
7. Different media can have different representations of the same thing.
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Representation Theorists:
(.)(.) Mulvey - "The Male Gaze"
Laura Mulvey on spectatorship:
"Mulvey argues 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'."
And:
"The defining characteristic of the male gaze is that the audience is forced to regard the action and characters of a text through the perspective of a heterosexual man; the camera lingers on the curves of the female body, and events which occur1 to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. The male gaze denies women agency, relegating them to the status of objects. The female reader or viewer must experience2 the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male."
(.)(.) Barthes - Cultural Myth Denotation + Connotation.
Relevant links:
(.)(.) De Saussure - Sign, Signifier, Signified etc Semiotics.
Relevant links:
(.)(.) Stuart Hall - Ways of reading encoding + Decoding.
Relevant links:
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