Baudrillard: How to apply?

Recap: Laura Mulvey

• Scopophilia = Pleasure from looking
• Cinema offers voyeuristic pleasures e.g. Visual pleasure
• Male scopophilic desires are satisfied
• Women connote "to-be-looked-at-ness"
• Men look, women are looked at
• Object/subject
• "Look" Theory = The first two looks* are invisible in classical narrative cinema meaning that the only visible look is that of the characters

*Look at "Mulvey" post

Dyer's Typography

Argues these re-presentations create types of "people"

Types links to "Typical"
The "types" portrayed become natural

These representations become part of a process of naturalising e.g. The idea of young people being bad or women being objects of desire to be look at only become natural to the audience, almost unconscious


In the Media:

"Kidulthood" = Represents British, urban, teenage females as highly sexualised, as sluts. This is presented as the reality, the norm, rather than simply a construction, and is endorsed by audiences as natural.


Media Platforms:

The Reality becomes the Construction and the Construction becomes the Reality

E.g. People assume that how they are living their lives, the Reality, is wrong and boring, and when watching films or TV programmes ("90210", "Kidulthood"), the Construction, is in fact what they should adopt and be like.


Beyonce's "Partition"

• Proves Mulvey's theory

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 gave is a position of power
• Richard Dyer = Questions the association of looking (the subject of the gaze) with being active, and being looked at (object of the gaze) as being passive
• Ann Kaplan = Argues that women can possess the look and make men the object of the gaze. However, this 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

Duran Duran "Girls on Film"