MM50 / MM51

Representation of the Female Gaze - MM50

1) The article is about the representation of females in the media. It explains how they are made out to be something completely delusional to the truth and reality. All females are brought to the expectation that the should be size zero to two, which diminishes the self confidence of females. This is said to be associated with the female gaze, as women are used to trap men into this belief that all ladies are like this, and encourage the size zero want. However, due to the increase of females and males with anxiety about body mass, some advertisements encouraging size zero, have been banned.

2) Perfect 14.

3) Laura Mulvey's theory of the Male Gaze is that women are presented for men to look at, and objectify as an object. More recently, the idea of the ‘female gaze’ has been suggested. Female gaze differs in this article as they are presenting women as something different to what would expectedly appeal to men. A size 14/16 would stereotypically not appeal to a male, compared to a 0/2 size. This is diverted in the article, as they are aiming to prove that bigger sized girls are equally attractive, and should be advertised more.

4) Personally, I believe that women of all sizes should be allowed to be advertised in the media. I think any woman can appear and look good, despite what size they are. Objectifying women as 'oversized' or 'weighty' is discriminating and should be banned. I also believe that size 0 is anorexic and should definitely not be advertised as it is promoting lack of eating and theoretically illness. The media currently does not feature size 14 models as it is not what attracts their viewers. The stereotype of women having to be a certain size is so entrenched in society, that it perhaps can't be evicted. Due to this, anxiety levels are on the increase and will keep increasing until something in the media is changed.

5) I believe that film trailer is aiming to achieve a positive response from their public. They are trying to divert the stereotype of females having to look like the caucasian size zero. The use to real life plus sized females increase the validity of the subject. Their emotional journeys and stories of bullying makes us think that there really is nothing that should segregate any sized female from another. The term size zero is just an exclusion term to create the false belief in the media.

Representation Old and New - MM51

1) The article is about representation and how the media represents products in order to carefully create a meaning for them. Its the combination of key media languages that construct a representation of a person, group or place.  Also how representations are created and how they create meaning. That is the central and most basic way to understand the media. Another thing pointed out in the article is that everything we see on the media is a representation and doesn't usually reflect a true presentation of that person, group or place. 

2) Traditionally, the power to create representations has been in the hands of media producers working within media institutions. In ‘old’ pre-digital media forms this is still true. A film director makes choices which will determine how he/she will represent the city in which the story is set; a TV producer will decide if a positive or negative presentation of the subject will be created; a press or TV news editor will decide on the appropriate slant for a journalist’s story.

3) When analysing representations, it is always essential to question who is creating them, and why. All media products have a specific function which will impact on the representations they construct. Producers will consider: the expectations and needs of the target audience, the limitations provided by genre codes, the type of narrative they wish to create, their institutional remit. All representations, then, are the cumulative effect of a collection of media language choices. Certain choices are made; others are rejected. The representation itself is the combination of these selections and rejections. The
elements that are rejected do not carry the meaning the producer wants to communicate.

4) Hall argued that audiences do not necessarily accept the ideology of texts passively, but instead draw on their own cultural and social experiences to create their own interpretations. In his view ‘meanings’ and messages are not fixed by the creator of the text, but depend on the relationship between the reader/viewer, and the text.