A2 Media Studies Horror and Representation

The Classic Theoretical View of how Women are Represented in the Media

A wide range of media studies and sociology research of a range of media texts has traditionally reached
similar conclusions about how gender is represented in the media. This research has come to represent a
sort of classic approach to gender in the media. If you have studied this area at school before it is likely
that your teacher based the work on the findings of this body of older work from the 1970s and 80s.

Males and females are usually presented in terms of stereotypes:
Males in the media are shown to be dominant, strong, active, independent, intellectual and
authoritative.
Females are shown as submissive, passive, with a focus on physical beauty (defined very narrowly),
sexuality, and emotionality. They are often defined through relationships with men.

Jeremy Tunstall (The Media in Britain 1983) looked at a wide range of the existing research that had been
carried out on gender representation in the media. He argued that overall, the existing research found that
representation of women in the media emphasised women's
domestic
sexual
consumer
marital
activities to the exclusion of all else. Women are depicted as busy housewives, as contented mothers, as
eager consumers and as sex objects.

Although similar numbers of men are fathers and husbands, the media has much less to say about these male
roles; men are seldom presented in the nude, and their martial or family status is not quoted in irrelevant
contexts e.g. (Grandmother wins Nobel prize! is possible as a headline, but what about Grandfather?)

1992 research demonstrated that on screen men outnumber women by two to one. Therefore visibility itself
is an issue when thinking about media representations. Many groups of women are still largely absent in all
sections of the media, e.g. black women, lesbian women, and older women (think about the average age of
male news readers compared to female news readers and the recent removal of the Strictly Come Dancing
older woman judge).

Later analysis of adverts showed that the images portrayed had changed to some extent. One study showed
that males and females occur approximately equally as primary characters in prime time TV adverts. Males
and females now tended to use scientific and non-scientific arguments with equal frequency. But
Males were still significantly more likely than females to be shown having an occupation
Males are more likely than females to be shown away from home and out of doors
Males are still more likely to be depicted as authorities and females as consumers, though less so
than in the past.

And also, theres no guarantee that any progress between one decade and the next will stay. In the 1980s
there were no lads mags like Loaded as they would have probably been regarded as offensive to women.
Similarly it has been argued that female protagonists in action movies like Lara Croft are a step backwards from
earlier women protagonists (like Sigourney Weavers character in Alien or Sarah Connor in Terminator) because
the Lara Croft-type heroine is presented in much more objectified, sexualised terms than the female
protagonists of the previous generation. So progress is never one way every generation struggles over
gender ideology, and sometimes things step backwards.
A2 Media Studies Horror and Representation
Women's bodies continue to be exploited in advertisements as sexual commodities to sell anything from after
shave to motor cycles and ice creams. However, recently there has been an increased use of male models -
involving beauty and near nudity. Is this a step towards equality?

In women's magazines, women have been portrayed and addressed primarily in terms of their domestic role
(as homemaker, wife and mother) and their sexuality. Magazines aimed at women fall into 2 broad
categories - those which focus on fashion and beauty and 'getting a man' and those which deal with the
three C's cooking, cleaning and caring.

The Male Gaze
In addition to the roles of women in the media, another important area is to do with how the camera looks
at women. Many critics have argued that in mainstream visual media the camera routinely objectifies
women denies them any subjectivity/identity and treats them as objects to be looked at by the subject,
who is almost always male. See the handout on the Male Gaze.

Representation and Horror
To what extent does horror reinforce or depart from these classic representations? Carole Clover in her
book Men, Women and Chainsaws argues powerfully that the processes of identification/objectification
going on in many horror texts are much more complicated than the typical male gaze
identification/objectification of many genres. Clover argues that instead of a sadistic objectification of the
woman which occurs in many mainstream texts, horror provides a point of masochistic identification with
her.

The Male Gaze
Many theorists (especially Laura Mulvey in her famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) have
suggested that much commercial cinema puts the spectator into the position of an appraising heterosexual
male by adopting technical camera strategies which present women as objects to be looked at and men as
subjects who do the looking.

The audience is literally put into the eyes of the male who is usually the main protagonist - who looks
voyeuristically at an objectified female.

Cinematic techniques involved in creating a male gaze:
Use of CU, POV and reaction shots of the male to encourage identification with him as the subject.
Use of long shots, tilts up the body (fragmentation of body parts e.g. seeing only legs) often from a male
point of view of the woman to encourage the audience to look at her as an object, rather than a subject
and as sexually displayed for male (and the implied male audience) pleasure.

Mulvey and others argue that mainstream film is part of the sexist regime of viewing which denies women
subjectivity and encourages culture to view women as objects for male pleasure. The male gaze is a
sadistic, voyeuristic way of controlling women by denying their right to their own subjectivity.

Now have a think about responses to the following questions (you do not need to blog these).

A2 Media Studies Horror and Representation
If the male gaze in mainstream cinema is true then
What about women or gay men as consumers of mainstream male gaze films? How do they interpret
these moments?

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger suggests that in our sexist society women look at themselves through a
loop of masculinity e.g. a woman looking at herself in a mirror, trying on clothes and seeing herself as
males will see her. The male gaze is thus internalised and becomes part of a womans sense of her self-
identity (cultivation theory).

What about genres which display the male body e.g. action movies are they suggesting a female
gaze? Or a homoerotic male gaze?

What about Lara Croft and Buffy? Are they the meeting of subject and object?

The male gaze as part of our culture is well documented but does a female gaze exist in our culture? This
would need to be more than one or two ironic reversals like the Coke ad. Can we test for this when,
historically, the majority of culture products have been produced by men (Hollywood directors, etc).
Perhaps we should look to womens lifestyle magazines since they are the domain of women, written for
and by women. (They removed the male centrefold from Cosmopolitan in the 1980s because women
found it more humorous than anything else!)

How might this relate to the horror genre, and the figure of the final girl?