Theories

 Here are a few theories we studied in class and tried to apply to our music video as well as our creative critical reflection.

Levi Strauss - Binary opposites - believed that the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain, but by our understanding of the difference between the word and its 'opposite' or, as he called it 'binary opposite'.  
 
Todorov, T - Identified 5 stages of narrative/story and the notion that plots have a circular narrative. 
 
Equilibrium: (sets the scene) Everyday Life – established what life is like for the main characters before anything happens. 
 
Disruption: (complication) Something happens to alter the equilibrium – there may be a series of disrupting events throughout the story. 
 
Recognition of Disruption: (climax) Key characters realize a disruption has occurred.
 
Repair of Disruption: Characters struggle to deal with the disruption and restore equilibrium
 
New Equilibrium: (satisfactory end) Back to normal, peace restored (but never the same) - new normality! Maybe better, similar, or worse than the original equilibrium.
 
Barthes – says texts may be 'open' (i.e. unraveled in a lot of different ways) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on). Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes.
 
Action Code: (probiotic code) advance the narrative – they drive it forwards. The Proairetic Code also builds tension as it sets the reader guessing what will happen next. 
 
Enigma Code: (hermeneutic code) refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader. Enigmas are puzzles, questions the audience wants to be answered. 
 
Symbolic Code: This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. This is typically done through the use of symbols. 
 
Cultural Code: (referential code) Something that is read with understanding due to cultural awareness (e.g. youth culture uses certain words that are understood by that culture; a British film may well show schools, pubs, and landmarks that British audiences recognize). The cultural codes tend to point to our shared knowledge about the way the world works. Landmarks, etc can be part of this. 
 
General Representation theories
 
Lippman - First to coin the term, ‘stereotype’. Initially, the word stereotype wasn’t meant to be negative and was simply meant as a shortcut or ordering process. Lippmann claimed that a stereotype was a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation etc. An attitude based on such a preconception and is a way to define a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type. 
 
Lippmann – representation theory.  He tried to explain how pictures that arise spontaneously in people’s minds come to be—a simplification of his theory is that ‘we live in second-hand worlds’. Because we are aware of much more than we have personally experienced and what we see. 
 
Althusser - Suggests that 'ideological state apparatus is enforced by media, education, religion, and family who maintain hegemony and enforce dominant values (hegemony) across society.
 
John Corner - Examined the process of realism/verisimilitude within media texts. How realism is present in texts. 
 
Andrea Medhurst (1995) suggested that stereotypes can be seen as a type of media shorthand -  these provide an easy point of contact when the text needs to communicate quickly with an audience. 
 
Representations of Youth
 
Acland  - Argued that representations of delinquent youths help reinforce dominant hegemony.  Referred to as the 'ideology of protection' model. (Deviant Youth, 1995).  'Normal' adult and youth behavior, contrasted with deviant youth behavior, allows the state to have more control.   
 
Emile Durkheim – Labelling theory holds that deviance is not inherent to an act, but instead the result of the externally-imposed label of "deviant".  It focuses on the tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from standard cultural norms. 
 
 
Representations of Class
 
Alvarado et al. 1987) ‘Television is... the most rewarding medium to use when teaching representations of class because of the contradictions which involve a mass medium attempting to reach all the parts of its class-differentiated audience simultaneously...’     
 
Representations of race/ethnicity
 
Alvarado - Tokenism - Tokenism is the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to be inclusive to members of minority groups. To have ‘token’ characters from certain races and backgrounds to fulfill quotas. 
 
Gilroy - postcolonial theory - ‘Othering’ What is a colony? A country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country.
 
Gilroy believes that colonial discourses continue to inform contemporary attitudes to race and ethnicity in the post-colonial era. 
 
Civilization-ism constructs racial hierarchies and sets up binary oppositions based on notions of otherness.
 
Representations of Gender/Relationships
 
 
Kilbourne – Suggests women are more often shown “dismembered” (just parts of their bodies shown) for sexualization. 
 
Laura Mulvey - The Male Gaze - the concept of women as objects in media and men as subjects (men looking at women).  In her 1973 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she argued that classic Hollywood cinema puts the spectator in a masculine position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In both these examples, the ‘male’ is active (the one doing the looking) and the ‘female’ is passive (the one being looked at).
Judith Butler - The media reinforces and exaggerates stereotypical ‘male’ and ‘female’ behavior, which we adopt as ‘normal’. In this way, gender becomes a performance, with the media providing the script. Theorist of power, gender, sexuality, and identity. She wrote ‘Gender Trouble’.  Butler suggests that gender is not the result of nature but is socially constructed e.g. male and female behavior and roles are not the result of biology but are constructed and reinforced by society through media and culture.
Barbara Fredrickson – objectification; she explored the consequences of being female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body in media texts.