The often criticized advertisements for American Apparel ... American Psychological Association put together a workgroup whose mandate it was to examine and ...
MEDIA LITERACY THROUGH FILM STUDIES: NEW MEDIA AS A TOOL FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' SEXUAL EDUCATION Caroline Martin, Concordia University, Canada Louis-Paul Willis, UQAT, Canada Film Studies, Media Literacy, Music Video, Sexual Education, Female Stereotypes, Feminism Media literacy against popular culture’s increasing sexualization There can hardly be any denying that today’s visual popular culture is highly sexualized. Media such as advertising, television, music videos and the cinema, to name but a few, all convey discourses and imageries where sexuality is prevalent. Advertising and music videos, for instance, have become experts in the art of using sexuality as a way to sell products or promote pop singers. The numerous ideological transformations that have punctuated the 20th century – such as secularization, as well as the feminist and sexual revolutions – have indeed definitely changed the way sexuality is signified in mass media. Whereas the representation of sexuality was particularly repressed during the heydays of the Motion Picture Production Code, which was a filmmaking censorship regime also known as the Hays Code, the prude ellipses and the austere marks of affection of the code days have gradually made room for a practically constraint-free representation of sexuality (Williams, 2008: 33). Over the last few decades, the increasing openness of sexual representation in popular visual culture has gradually brought on an abundance of a particular sexual imagery that Brian McNair (2002) adequately refers to as the “pornographication of the mainstream”, or as Richard Poulin describes it, the process by which pornographic archetypes are recycled within mainstream popular culture (Poulin, 2008: 55). Simply put, both McNair and Poulin see sexualization as a process that relies on the disappearance of the boundaries between popular culture and the traditionally marginalized pornographic culture. This pornographication of popular and mainstream culture has gradually created a context where sexual imagery is pervasive, and where sexual stereotypes are becoming more and more intricate throughout popular culture. It is needless to add that these stereotypes are often negative and restrictive. The consequences of this increasing sexualization in mass media are diverse; among them are the problematical identifications of children and youth to the often limited and negative sexual stereotypes that are transmitted through such images. A dominant thread among the many publications devoted to this question is that today’s children should benefit from an education that includes media literacy skills. However, in Quebec and in Canada, Grade School and High School programs do not include sufficient exposure to competencies related to media literacy; children are therefore not adequately equipped to face the myriad images they are confronted with in everyday life. Since the content of those images is often sexualized, with or without subtlety, students are facing a double challenge when trying to understand them: they are faced both with the ubiquitous discourse of popular culture and with its very high level of sexual content. For instance, in Quebec, Sexual Education courses have recently been removed from educational programs; teachers are expected to provide a form of sexual education through other classes such as French, English, Mathematics, Arts and Science – a hopeful expectation at best. And although specific situations may vary from one country to another, it remains obvious that Western cultures do not adequately prepare young generations to face the innumerable images they deal with in everyday life. In Sexy Inc. (Bissonette, 2007), a short documentary produced by Canada’s National Film Board, we can see this pervasiveness of sexuality in popular culture when a group of teenagers are faced with the challenge of differentiating images taken from teen magazines and from pornographic magazines, a less than obvious decoding. The often criticized advertisements for American Apparel
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clothing (see figure 1) provide an adequate example both of the pornographication of the mainstream as McNair describes it, and of the permeable boundaries between advertising and softcore pornography.
Figure 1: A typical advertisement for American Apparel Despite this disquieting context, the question of cultural and media sexualization has been scarcely explored by academic circles, with exceptions in the areas of psychology, sociology and sexology. In 2007, the American Psychological Association put together a workgroup whose mandate it was to examine and synthesize research conducted specifically around the topic of the sexualization of girls. In this report, sexualization was defined as a phenomenon that occurs when: • A person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; • A person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; • A person is sexually objectified – that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or • Sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person (APA, 2007: 2) Focusing mainly on the questions of objectification and the inappropriate imposition of sexuality, the report further notes a certain paradox where adult sexuality is connoted on young girls while at the same time adult women are considered attractive when they appear very young. Richard Poulin finds that this situation easily relates to the infantilized representation of women in pornographic discourses. This infantilization of women has gone beyond its pornographic origins and has gradually appeared in popular culture, particularly in the 1990s with icons such as Britney Spears (see figure 2). Of the few academic publications that examine this particular question, many link the sexualization and infantilization of women to the recuperation of the idea of “girl power”; as Lamb and Brown (2006) suggest, “the beginning of a genuine movement to give girls more power and more choice got co-opted and turned into a marketing scheme that reinforced age-old stereotypes” (1). Indeed, while the expression “girl power” originally aimed at encouraging girls to emancipate themselves in all areas, it has ended up connoting a sexual ideal of attractiveness and availability (Morency, 2008: 95). These are but a very few examples of the negative stereotypes offered by the mainstream sexualization of popular culture.
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Figure 2: Photography of Britney Spears taken by David Lachapelle for Rolling Stone # 810 (April 1999) Although it has been advocated in the past, it seems illusory to suppose that the discourse of popular culture can be brought to change. Given the increasing omnipresence of mainstream popular culture and its propensity for the representation of sexuality, we are convinced that media literacy remains the most effective tool to provide youth with the adequate abilities to question and criticize the messages and stereotypes they receive every day. Moreover, the APA report cited earlier insists on the fact that “school-based media literacy training programs could be key in combating the influence of sexualization” (APA, 2007: 36). In the same line of thought, Debra Mesrkin (2004) suggests that a greater ability to criticize media, and especially advertising, could attenuate the negative effects of the sexualization of young girls. In her qualitative study of four fashion advertisements, Merskin uses Mary-Lou Galician’s (2004) “seven-step dis-illusioning” model for media literacy. Throughout her analysis, Merskin relies on notions that are typical to Feminist Film Studies, such as the objectifying male gaze and scopophilic desire, in order to structure her analysis and to outline the pertinence of media literacy skills in countering negative sexual stereotypes. Given the role Feminist Film Studies have played in the development of alternative views on cinema, and given the importance of Film Studies in the analysis of media images at large, it is our conviction that certain paradigms associated with these specific academic fields can be brought to play an important role in the development of media literacy programs within High School classrooms. Not only are the frameworks typical to Film Studies frequently used to approach broader perspectives on popular visual culture, but this very culture relies more and more on cinematic codes of signification, as recent trends in video games and television tend to show. Therefore, in the following sections, we will provide a brief overview of notions associated to Film Studies, such as identification to the image, the male gaze, and gendered identification. These concepts will be presented in relation to their possible role in the teaching of media literacy; it is important to note that they will not be problematized in the context of Film Studies, but rather in the broader context of media literacy education. The second part of this paper will explore some of the possible classroom applications of these particular notions, in which the visual arts, media literacy and sexual education could be taught together. As one of the major contemporary vehicles of popular culture and sexual imagery, the music video will be used as the center of an example of didactic approaches in the art/multimedia class. These theoretical and practical applications can help students classify and recognize numerous sexual stereotypes, understand their role and influence within gender identification, and ultimately question them through the making of personal media productions. This second part of the presentation will be supported by the results of an independent study conducted in an Art and Multimedia course in a Quebec High School during the fall 2010 semester.
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Identification in Film Given the scope and perspective guiding us, the main conceptual tools to consider are the feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to Film Studies. Together, these two approaches have garnered some of the most prolific discourses on cinema. Furthermore, as they date from several decades, these set of concepts have since been largely explored and put to use in various frames of analysis and academic studies. One of the main points of focus these approaches share is the gaze; as a concept, the gaze is both foundational of the psychoanalytic approach to film, and the centerpiece of early Feminist Film Theory. In Film Studies, the gaze can be that of the camera, that of the actors, and most importantly that of the spectator. In a media literacy perspective, a key objective would be to develop a certain degree of criticism towards the gaze for which visual popular culture is created. Indeed, images have a very strong potential at generating spectator identification; we feel that alerting today’s youth of the roles images play in their own identity can be very instructive. At this point, it is therefore highly appropriate to review the main ideas that have emerged from Film Studies in the last few decades with regards to identification and the gaze. During the 1970s and 1980s, Film Studies were heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan – especially through the works of Stephen Heath, Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, to name but a few. Metz (1977) investigated the similarities between the dynamics of identification undergone by the subject and by the filmic spectator. He considered that cinematic identification replicates the two levels of identification – primary and secondary – that are theorized in the psychoanalytic field. Primary identification largely relies on what Lacan referred to as the mirror stage, a decisive moment when the infant recognizes his or her image in the mirror and is thus able to establish a relation to the image. It is crucial to note that Lacan defines this relation as simultaneous recognition and misrecognition. According to him, the infant that recognizes itself in the mirror is able to imagine an illusory mastery of its physical abilities, as the mirror image does not reflect the feelings of frustration and inability the infant has towards its lack of bodily coordination. On the contrary, the mirror reflects an image that is coherent and unified, thus identification to this image inevitably relies on misrecognition. The mirror stage consequently plays a fundamental role in establishing a primordial relation between the infant and its representation of itself; it is important here to note that Lacan sees this relation as a fictional one, namely because of the fact that the mirror image is necessarily fictive, an imaginary conception that does not feel the absence of abilities. Simply put, psychoanalysis conceives primary identification as the individual’s imaginary identification to the self (or ego); and it is the subject’s gaze that allows him to master this identification. At this point, Metz goes on to compare the film spectator’s gaze to the infant’s gaze, noting a similarity between the infant’s fascination for its mirror-image and the spectator’s fascination for the images on the screen. In both cases, the image being gazed upon contains an ideal, with one major difference: while the mirror image reflects the subject’s ideal self (or ideal ego), the spectator is profoundly absent from filmic image. For this reason, Metz refers to this stage of identification as primary cinematic identification; it is a stage where the spectator identifies with the cinematic gaze, making it his own “all-perceiving” gaze. Once again in psychoanalytic terms, it is the Oedipus complex that marks the subject’s entry into the realm of language, signification and subjectivity – or what Lacan call the symbolic order. Through language and signification, the individual can establish a form of subjectivity in which he/she can say “I”. For Lacan, the subject itself is always defined in opposition to the Other, who represents what the subject is not – and can thus be idealized. Therefore, in order to consolidate his subjectivity, the individual must identify with others. In this vein, and in order to escape from the Oedipal impasse, the infant projects his desire unto the other parent, identifying with theirs, therefore abiding to the rules and morals of society, and assuming his/her own subjectivity. Consequently, secondary identification is a projection allowing the individual to escape a form of dissatisfaction by identifying with the Other. It is a symbolic identification and plays an essential role in defining the subject in relation to his/her desires. Keeping these notions in mind, Metz conceives a second level of cinematic identification: once the spectator has accepted the filmic gaze as his own, through primary cinematic identification, he/she can project himself onto the characters and the plot within the film, a level of identification that Metz (1977) coined as secondary cinematic identification. It is important to note that because of the spectator’s complete abandonment to the film’s characters and plot, it is through this level of identification that the ideological power of the cinema resides. According to psychoanalytic film theorists such as Metz, cinema has the power to replicate the illusory primacy of the image as ideal, through primary cinematic identification; it then has the capability of generating secondary identifications to these ideals, thus shaping desires and subjectivities. Of course, because all our relations to images
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replicate the imaginary dynamics of the mirror stage (see figure 3), the notions mentioned here not only apply to film, but to most visual media. In this respect, knowledge of the dynamics related to cinematic identification can easily be seen as vectors towards the development of refined media literacy. Students can be taught to detect images that make a strong attempt at creating or modifying ideals and desires, while at the same time developing awareness towards their own gaze and the images that appeal to it. Subject
Spectator Primary identification
Mirror
Screen Secondary identifications
Other individuals
Screen characters
Figure 3: a schematized comparison of psychoanalytic identification and cinematic identification. Feminism and the Gendered Gaze Psychoanalytic Film Studies have played an important role in determining the importance and scope of images, the filmic gaze, and their influence on spectators. However, this particular paradigm has also made possible the development of a feminist approach to Film Studies. Feminist Film Studies have indeed relied on the study of the gaze since the 1970s, especially since Laura Mulvey’s influential and foundational essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, first published in 1975. Although this particular article has sparked numerous debates, many of which are ongoing, the scope of our current study brings us to willingly avoid these debates in order to focus on Mulvey’s approach to the gaze, which is still widely recognized as valid. Largely based on Lacan’s conception of an unconscious that is “structured like a language”, Mulvey attempts to discover how the unconscious of patriarchal society has modeled the cinema. According to her, “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey, 2009: 14). Cinema, she notes, confines women to passive roles, as objects of contemplation; the represented Woman is therefore castrated in the sense that she does not occupy an active role within the film – or if she does, she is necessarily a castrating villainess. In most cases, Woman connotes what Mulvey refers to as “tobe-looked-at-ness”, and is therefore the object of an erotic and fetishistic gaze. This basic statement of objectification acts as the foundation of Mulvey’s reflection, and can still be noted in contemporary cinema as well as contemporary visual culture, for instance in the music video. Current film scholars still abide by this assumption, noting that “the representation of ‘Woman’ as a spectacle to be looked at pervades visual culture” (Chaudhuri, 2006: 2). The core idea guiding Mulvey’s essay is that of scopophilia, a notion she reclaims from Freud in order to study the dynamics and manifestations of visual pleasure. Directly related to the scopic drive, which is the need to see and the desire to look, scopophilia is conceived as the visual pleasure that results from the sight of another human. Given this conception, visual pleasure, as Mulvey perceives it, is based on the same dynamics of identification that we have discussed earlier with Lacan’s mirror stage. However, as Mulvey adds, “conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world” (Mulvey, 2009: 17). The identification process within the cinema therefore functions on the basis of a voyeuristic scopophilia: the subject takes pleasure in gazing upon other subjects that are supposedly unaware they are being watched. Using Lacan’s mirror stage as a foundation for her analysis, Mulvey believes that the male spectator identifies with the screen character(s) on the bases of recognition and misrecognition through which a screen ideal appears within film characters. Through this combination of Freudian notions of scopophilia and Lacanian notions of identification, she proposes a dual functioning of the gaze in the cinema: on one hand, the spectator’s gaze is in “direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment”; on the other hand, the same spectator is “fascinated with
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the image of his like [the male hero] set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis” (Mulvey, 2009: 21). Thus it is the gaze, both as motor of imaginary identification and as vector of voyeurism, that sustains Mulvey’s reflection on the treatment of Women within the cinema. Understandably, the identification dynamics described here work very well within other visual media, such as advertising and music videos. As mentioned earlier, Mulvey’s analysis has garnered much criticism throughout the decades; one of the main accusations that have been addressed to her essay is that of generalizing the filmic gaze as male. Nevertheless, she openly admits the premise of the essay was “limited and polemical”, and that “Hollywood, not cinema in general, was supremely suited for such an analysis” (Mulvey, 2009: xvi). Moreover, despite what can appear as a gross generalization, today’s popular visual culture does in fact proceed with a definitive objectification of the female body, and thus Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze as male can be put to contribution in attempting to develop a form of media literacy. Although the scope of this study does not allow us to problematize questions of reception from the young male or young female’s point of view, suffice it to mention that the objectification of the female body – or even the male body – within visual popular culture presents a highly potent and somewhat problematic imaginary ideal, an ideal that calls upon subjects’ identification. And although this situation relies on a very contemporary cultural context, it rises from artistic traditions that by far predate the arrival of modern culture and mass media. In this respect, it is important to note that Mulvey is not the only one to perceive the gaze as dominantly male. In the same years as “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was published in Screen, art critic John Berger published Ways of Seeing, where he approached similar questions related to the gaze, albeit through the much vaster field of pictorial art. Berger devotes a full chapter to the examination of the nude tradition in painting, where Woman is painted for the contemplating pleasure of a supposed male spectator. He suggests that “the social presence of a woman is different from that of a man” (Berger, 1977: 45), and that this difference is expressed through visual representations that culminate in the nude tradition, where “men act and women appear”, and where “men look at women [and] women watch themselves being looked at” (47). Berger sees the representation of women, both in traditional painting and in modern visual culture, as a spectacle inviting to objectify the female body. And like Mulvey, he perceives the spectator as essentially male: “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (64). This condition is intrinsically related to the fact that, in the nude tradition as in pictorial art at large, “the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women” (64), a context that still exists to a large extent in today’s popular cultural production. Ultimately, both Mulvey’s and Berger’s analyses of a dominant male gaze are not only pertinent still today, but constitute key elements in the advocacy of visual media literacy, as we will discuss shortly. The development of feminism, along with that of sociology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, gradually led to the interdisciplinary field known today as Gender Studies. As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir suggested that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, adding that “no biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature […] which is described as feminine” (De Beauvoir, 1989: 267). Rereading this well-known affirmation with a Lacanian perspective, it becomes obvious that femininity is a product of the symbolic order – produced by signification. Of course, if the feminine is a social construction, the masculine is also unavoidably a fictitious construct produced by the symbolic: there lies the basis of contemporary Gender Studies. Furthermore, if gender is produced by social discourse, which necessarily includes cultural discourse, it is obvious that cinema represents one of the many “institutions [that] produce discourses that have the power to produce and promote representations of gender, which are then internalized by subjects” (Chaudhuri, 2006: 67). In this regard, Teresa de Lauretis, one of Feminist Film Studies’ prominent contributors to the Gender Studies field, suggests that gender is an ‘ideologicotechnological production’ that relies on mass media discourse to produce masculine and feminine identities (De Lauretis, 1987). Keeping this in mind, it appears obvious that the dynamics of the gaze produced by mainstream cinema and popular visual culture play a role in determining gender identification. As such, although it would be somewhat of a generalization to assume that the gaze is essentially male, it is far less hazardous to suggest that the male gaze, produced by a mainstream popular culture itself led by patriarchy, is a construct of cultural discourse. This gendered gaze can be conceived as a defining factor in gender identification, where male equates
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activity and female equates ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. Ultimately, the possession of the Mulveyan male gaze can be seen as determining of the male gender, socially defined as active, virile and heterosexual (Butler, 1990: 38). Now the obvious questions are: where does this conceptual detour leave us with regards to media literacy and its transmission to high school students? And what use can the complex notions very succinctly discussed here have on the possibilities for high school teachers to bring their students to question cultural discourses? It is our contention that the conceptual paradigms presented here, significant in the field of Film Studies, can be brought to play a role in the development of media literacy abilities in teenaged students. First off, as these concepts have been developed over more than 30 years, they have been overly discussed, vulgarized and put to use in various studies. Therefore, teachers can easily gain basic knowledge related to identification and the gendered gaze, enabling them to incorporate these notions into their teaching. By placing students in contact both with the notions of gaze and identification, and with cultural objects that rely on them to ensure their dissemination, students can be brought to recognize the way these objects tend to influence their “ways of seeing” and induce them into replicating gender-based stereotypes. They can reflect on film, on advertising, on music videos, as well as many other media that diffuse popular visual culture. In the following section, we will exemplify the use that can be made of these conceptual paradigms through examples related to the music video and its possible classroom analysis. The ‘Cinematic’ Music Video The music video for The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star (Russell Mulcahy, 1979), shown on MTV in 1981, is considered by many to be one of the first mainstream music videos. Prior to this moment, music videos were considered essentially as a promotional item for songs and/or albums, and consisted mostly of a performance of the song within a specific context. This new type of visual media did not represent the beginning of pop musical culture per se, but it certainly represented the beginning of the massive visual influence of pop musical culture on youths’ lives. In the 1980s, the music video abandoned the video camera, turning towards the 35mm camera and trying to legitimate itself as an authentic type of artistic production. The budgets allocated to music videos, as well as the technology involved, became at times equivalent to those of actual cinematographic productions (Jean-Marc Lalanne, 2000). In the United States, the music video for Micheal Jackson’s Thriller (John Landis, 1983) still incarnates one of the best examples of that specific type of ambitious music video, although subsequent videos of Jackson’s songs were also very frequently cinematic in style. In France, the music video directed by Laurent Boutonnat for French singer Mylène Farmer’s Désanchantée (1991), to name but one, also put forward a highly cinematic narrative model. Rapidly, the music video became a major, if not the strongest, promotional medium for all pop singers, as it participated in transforming them into visual icons. During the 1980s, 90% of MTV’s aired content consisted of televised music videos (Jean-Marc Lalanne, 2000). This channel had and still has a huge teenaged audience, despite today’s growing popularity of sites such as YouTube. Many aspects of visual popular culture can be analyzed within the representations that music videos transmit through their images, but in our opinion, one of the most significant for the education of today’s youth is the pornographication and sexualization of cultural discourses. The first part of this paper explained some of the most useful notions developed and related to Film Studies, such as identification to the image, the male gaze, and gendered identification. These notions can easily be used with high school students in order to analyze highly sexualized music videos. The first part of the following section will exemplify such an analysis through one of the most popular and sexual pop icons of the moment: Lady Gaga. Through the examination of the music video for the song Bad Romance (Francis Lawrence, 2009), we will identify and analyze one of the most common and sexually charged female stereotypes: The "Femme Fatale" or "Vamp” (Guerrilla Girls', 2003). The second part will provide an explanation of the role and influence of this stereotype in the formation of the female identity. And we will finally give an example of an artistic production in the art/multimedia classroom that could help students criticize this specific female stereotype. From Passively “Irresistible” to Dangerously “Fatale” The representation of female sexuality in music videos has changed in many ways over the last decades. But since it's very beginning, the female body was used as THE pole of attraction of the male spectator’s gaze. Music videos of the 1980s, such as the one for Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible (Terence Donovan, 1988) for instance, disseminated a highly stereotyped and sexualized representation of Woman. In this particular video, Woman is clearly objectified in the way the American Psychological Association defines it (APA, 2007): her only
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value comes from her body. It is the center of the spectator’s and the camera’s gaze, since there is absolutely nothing else interesting to watch. The women wear very sexy clothing and their make up, especially their lipstick and their nail polish, is red and shinny, keeping them in the standard that "equates physical attractiveness with being sexy"(APA, 2007). Their only noticeable action is that of dancing in a very sexual way, or to move slowly in a suggestive attitude with their eyes slightly closed and their mouths slightly opened. During the guitar solo, we can see one of them playing the guitar, but we cannot see her face. That leads us to the third part of the APA's definition of sexualization, which relates to objectification. In this music video, all the women look and are dressed the same, but most of all, the different sexual parts of their bodies are often showed separated from their head. For that reason, they are not shown as individuals, they are only duplicates, and by breaking their bodies into fragments, it is even more difficult to recognize one from another. This specific strategy is often used in objectifying, and especially pornographic, discourses: it is much easier to objectify a fragmented body than a fully represented subject. Fragmentation removes all traces of subjectivity; therefore rather than triggering identification, it invites objectification, a strategy often used in cinema either to reduce the perception of humanity within a character (such as an enemy in a war movie), or to increase sexualization. Using this specific strategy, the music video for Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible positions Woman into her classical cinematographic role as Mulvey conceives it: a passive object of contemplation. Given a little assistance, any high school student can be brought to recognize the sexually negative stereotype of the "Bimbo" (Guerillas Girls, 2003) in this music video; students should also easily recognize that the women are posited as sexual objects. However, it is important to note that something determining has changed during the recent evolution of the pop music video: the female singers themselves have now appropriated and are using these stereotypes to perpetuate the aforementioned "girl power" (Lamb and Brown, 2006). In the 1980s, Madonna gave an apparent positive boost to female sexual power by setting herself in a very active position towards (her) sexuality. By doing so, she became the icon of a specific stereotype described by the Guerrilla Girls as the "Bitch" or "Ballbreaker": Call a women a Bitch or a Ballbreaker and what image comes to mind? A strong, aggressive female who isn't afraid to speak her mind, suffers no fools, and takes no nonsense. […] In Middle English, circa 1000, a bitch was a female dog and still is. But around 1600 it began to be used to describe a brazen, unpleasant, selfish, lewd woman (Guerillas Girls, 2003: 2526). But as Lamb and Brown (2006) specified, this new "power", this capacity of being in control, is often just a new way of reinforcing sexual stereotypes. The apparent “girl power” held by female pop stars can easily confuse the comprehension and the analysis the students can make of the music video and what appears as a positive/active female image. With this context in mind, let us now examine the music video for Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. This video shows a typical example of the paradoxical female representation that Mulvey describes in her essay; furthermore, it also almost perfectly follows the sexualized female image described by the APA. Despite the evident and unconcealed sexualization of Lady Gaga in this music video, we will pinpoint some important facts. It is more than obvious that her body is the center of attraction: it is the center of attraction of the spectator’s gaze, male and/or female, and it is also the center of attraction of the male characters within the music video, since the story is literally about transforming a “monster” into a pretty and sexy woman, in order to auction her off to the one man willing to pay the greatest amount of money. Her body may be not shot in parts, like the women’s in Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible, but she remains evidently posited as an object, moreover one that money can buy. While not fragmented, her body is objectified both by its high visibility and by her lack of subjectivity, which in turn relies on the use of masks and lighting to displace emphasis from her face to the rest of her body. She is “forced” into transformation, when two other women make her drink a morphology-changing potion, and then “forced” again to dance for the interested buyers. This music video thus corresponds perfectly with the last part of the APA's definition of sexualization since “sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon” Lady Gaga. Also, just as in Robert Palmer's music video, there is practically nothing to watch except for her body and the strange and sexy outfits she wears. She doesn’t do much except dance in a sexual and suggestive way, although she shows a more aggressive type of movement then the suave and ‘passively irresistible’ women in Robert Palmer’s video. The radical change that arises from the comparison of both music videos is that Lady Gaga is ultimately
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shown as taking action. She uses her “girl power” against the man who pays one million dollars to buy her, burning him to death. As she is walking towards him, in a fur coat/wedding dress, she again undresses to reveal her almost naked body. Not long after, we can see that he is burning on the bed while she stands next to the fire in a static and stylish posture. One could argue that she takes her revenge at the end by destroying the man who was supposed to use her as his sexual object; any type of “girl power” evidenced in the video would rely on this precise argument. However, the type of power she possesses in this music video, and the lethal action she takes at the end, simply reinforce an old and powerful negative female stereotype: the Vamp/Femme Fatale: The Femme Fatale is an evil, conniving woman hell-bent on seducing men and leading them to ruin and damnation. [...] Men find her irresistible and are reduced to helpless prey in her cunning clutches (Guerrilla Girls, 2003: 20). This stereotype corresponds to what Mulvey describes with regards to the active female role in cinema. The Vamp/Femme Fatale can be, and MUST be, the object of contemplation, but she is an active woman, and by being so she can only be dangerous to men; a castrating villainess. Moreover, it is also interesting to note that the Vamp/Femme Fatale stereotype was also born in the fictional world: Femme Fatales are everywhere in art, theatre, movies, literature, and religious myths [...] In the beginning there was Eve, who got us all thrown out of paradise. Then there was Delilah, who seduced Samson and reduced him to a wimp with a small haircut. And let's not forget Salome, who performed her lurid Dance of the Seven Veils then took as payment the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter (Guerrilla Girls', 2009: 20). In post-war America, the Femme Fatale surfaced as the iconic figure typical of film noir, a highly studied emblem in the field of Feminist Film Studies. Briefly put, sexual stereotypes articulated by film noir reflect “the disturbances to traditional notions of masculinity and gender roles caused by the war and post-war readjustment” (Grant, 2007: 26). The noir hero is typically faced with two feminine figures: the comforting and domesticated housewife, and the seducing, treacherous and castrating Femme Fatale. These two figures incarnate the active/passive paradox Mulvey associates with the filmic representation of Woman. In the music video for Bad Romance, Lady Gaga’s character is without a doubt the Vamp/Femme Fatale or castrating villainess. Like Salome, she performs a “lurid dance” for the males in order to seduce them, and then she gets back at them by killing the one who thought he could buy her. The main negative side of this stereotype is directly related to female sexuality. First, because her sexuality is the only “power” that is acknowledged to her, thus it denies her other forms of power (Guerrilla Girls', 2003: 24). Second, this stereotype reinforces the idea that female sexuality is dangerous, perverse and related to death. At the end of Bad Romance, we can see Lady Gaga lying next to the man in their scorched bed. She is almost naked, blackened by the fire, smoking a cigarette; most of all her bra is sending electric sparks, letting us suppose that is how she burned her former “owner”. Her female sexual attributes, her breasts, are apparently turned into a lethal weapon. She thereby literally incarnates what psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva defines as the abject in her essay Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (1982). Making allusions to Lacan’s notion of a symbolic order, Kristeva argues that Woman has become, through her subordination in Judaic and Christian cultures, a powerful source of horror due to her feminine characteristics that are unfathomable to man – namely her sexuality and ability to give birth. She thus escapes symbolic signification. In the music video for Bad Romance, Lady Gaga may not possess the typical and mythical “vagina dentata” attributed to certain female deities by patriarchal religions, but she has a highly dangerous and castrating breast. Moreover, she is abject because she perturbs the traditional phallocentric system (or patriarchal symbolic order); she breaks the rules of male sexual domination in this video, generating a danger typical of the Femme Fatale. In many ways, Lady Gaga is shown in this music video as an abject monster. She initially emerges from a white container that reads: MONSTER, through an interesting allusion to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a science fiction/horror movie that plays on several levels with notions related to abjection (Creed, 1993). Just as the seven astronauts emerge from their virginal white sleep pods in what Barbara Creed calls a “rebirthing scene” (Creed, 1993: 18) at the beginning of Alien, the seven female characters in the music video emerge – are born – from seven white pods, with features that suggest they are still “unformed” and therefore highly abject. Lady Gaga’s body is not totally human: her ribs are prominent, her fingers seem longer and crooked, and her eyes are disproportioned to the size of her face. The spectator can see an abject side of Lady Gaga that the male characters are not allowed to see,
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because she will be transformed into a desirable and acceptable object of visual pleasure, and will thereby fit social, cultural and symbolic standards of beauty. Her final “revenge” then confirms that she is still a monster inside; that she is still abject even thought she became sexy and beautiful. For Kristeva, the abject is first and foremost that which escapes explanation and comprehension within the symbolic. In this respect, the music video for Bad Romance presents an abject character that eludes acceptable significations of femininity; she is forcefully brought to change and incarnate an acceptable female signification as “object for sale”; and finally, once sold, the monster within gets her revenge. The incarnation of the Vamp/Femme Fatale stereotype, while allowing the music video to articulate an interesting discourse on male domination, nevertheless fails to escape the stereotypical depiction of femininity. The video therefore constitutes an interesting pedagogical tool for deconstructing these specific representations of Woman in visual popular culture. Deconstructing the Vamp/Femme Fatale Stereotype in the Art/Multimedia Class. Since the implementation of the most recent Quebec educational program reform in 2001, the sexual education of students has become the responsibility of all the teachers in grade schools and high schools. The Ministry of Education (MELS) produced a document to guide and help teachers in that new and delicate task (Duquet, 2003). One of the main ideas guiding this document is that sexual education should follow the socioconstructivist approach which builds on what the student already knows in order to construct, and sometimes reconstruct, learning (Duquet, 2003: 24). In this regard, one can ask: what do teenagers know about female stereotypes and their role and influence in the formation of their identity? And when should this specific question be discussed with them as a part of a learning activity? Among topics prescribed by the MELS for adolescents (12 to 17 years) are the “Roles, Stereotypes and Social Norms”; through the teaching of these topics, students should be able to distinguishing roles assigned exclusively to one sex or the other, as well as their negative or positive effect on personal development and on society (Duquet, 2003: 28). This statement directly calls upon the field of Gender Studies, and can easily lead to the inclusion of notions discussed earlier within the High School classroom. In this respect, we strongly believe that media literacy could be one of the best tools to help students achieve this specific knowledge concerning sexuality. However to reach this competency and knowledge, it is essential that the students go through certain steps. We would therefore propose the project that follows to students between 12 and 14 years of age. At this age, one of the significant features of their psychosexual development is that they are still consolidating their sexual identities (Duquet, 2003: 26). It therefore appears as the best moment to approach sexual stereotypes, while there is still time to help them become more aware of some of those stereotypes, to recognize them and eventually criticize them. However the first step of this project should be the acknowledgement of the strong potential of images in generating spectator identification. For a 12-year-old student, the concepts of identification in cinema as Metz defined them are unknown, although they are experienced an endless number of times through the viewing of television, movies and music videos. If students don’t understand that the act of watching images creates a deep identification, they will not understand how the stereotypes in visual media can have a huge influence on their psychosexual development. Therefore, once they acknowledge that moving images have the power to shape desires and subjectivities, they can then see how the stereotypes they are faced with everyday need to be analyzed and criticized. One of the best ways to show how identification works in moving images is to watch a suspense sequence. In 2007, the Société d'assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) produced a television advertisement about the human casualties related to driving accidents. This advertisement was meant to produce a strong effect on the spectators in order to make them feel the danger related to certain driving habits, and eventually discourage these very habits. We are shown the shock of the accident from inside the car as we are “sitting” next to the driver. We then see the man entering the emergency room, covered in blood, and while the doctors are trying to save the man's life, we see his wife and young daughter being informed of his status. The advertisement then uses a parallel montage, alternating the speech of a police officer about the statistics related to car accidents, and the emergency room conversation. The suspense is well created, since we are waiting, like the family, to know if the man will survive. When we finally see the heartbeat flatline and the family crying the death of the man, the identification process reaches its culminant point as we mourn, with the family, this unexpected death. The SAAQ was openly using to its full potential the identification process explained by Metz, just as other similar shock-advertisement campaigns have done elsewhere. Watching this kind of advertisement can help students understand how identification works in moving images and how powerful it is over the spectator, specifically because it is meant to produce a strong and easily recognizable emotion. If a short ad can generate shock over the fictional death of a perfect stranger, it is then easy
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to translate this new knowledge to the analysis of stereotypes in visual media such as the music video. Once they have been taught certain rudiments related to the manipulative capacity of moving images, many stereotypes can be explored with students in the case of a combined art/multimedia sex education activity or project. If we stay within the topic of “Roles, Stereotypes and Social Norms” as proposed by the MELS and the socio-constructivist approach, students can be asked to recognize female stereotypes in different media like advertising, television and cinema. During an independent research conducted in a Quebec high school, 14-yearold students had to find a music video that used a non-traditional visual style. They all completed this homework with great motivation and many of them wanted to present the music video they had found to the class and explain why they chose it. Music videos are part of everyday life for Quebec teenagers; they know many of them and they enjoy talking about them. Just like television advertisements, music videos have two important characteristics for the High School teacher wishing to use them in class: they are well known and appreciated by the majority of the students, and they are short and condensed. No rights are required to watch them on YouTube, and many examples can be used without spending hours in front of the computer. They are accessible and their impact on students is stronger because they are directly linked with their consumption of visual popular culture in real life. The stereotypes described by the Guerrilla Girls can easily be found in popular music videos known by teenaged audiences: beyond the videos discussed previously, additional examples include the “Butch/Tomboy” in Lady Gaga’s Telephone (Jonas Åkerlund, 2010), and the “Bitch/Ballbreaker” in Madonna’s Sorry (Jamie King, 2008), to name but a few. Finally, the last step of this learning activity targets the critical faculties of the students towards the previously discussed stereotypes with the use of the visual arts. In the document produced by the MELS on sex education in the context of the 2001 Quebec educational reform, teachers are advised of the necessity of encouraging [the students] to develop their judgment, sense of responsibility, critical faculties and capacity for discernment regarding certain aspects of sexuality (Duquet, 2003:7). And one of the best ways to exercise those capacities is the use of humour and creativity combined together. For this reason, and in light of our own independent study, we suggest bringing the students to create a pastiche of a highly stereotyped music video, such as Bad Romance, in order to help them attain the intellectual competency for “critical judgement” (MELS, 2004). One of the most interesting results of the independent study mentioned earlier was that although the students were asked to produce “media images” when they had to create a music video, they were practically always producing “personal images”. In the first type of images, the goal is to communicate a message in the most effective way to a targeted receiver. In the second, the students have to “convey their perception of reality and […] develop their creativity” (MELS, 2004: 366). Subsequently, given the obvious interest of teenagers for music videos and sexuality at large, any activity inviting them to create and/or criticize female stereotypes would bring them to articulate their own critical perception of a specific female stereotype. Since sexuality, even in its most psychosexual aspects, is not an easy subject to talk about in the classroom, the use of the pastiche, and the humour it implies, can help give this activity a more relaxed atmosphere. To conclude, throughout this very succinct venture into possible experimentations with media literacy in the High School classroom, we have attempted to show how specific conceptual paradigms associated with Film Studies and feminism can be put to use with teenaged students. The first and foremost challenge with regards to our advocacy for the use of concepts associated with these academic fields unavoidably resides within their less than obvious accessibility to High School teachers. However, as mentioned previously, notions related to cinematic identification, the male gaze, female objectification and the gendered gaze have been at the heart of Film Studies for a few decades now. As such, several publications aiming to vulgarize and popularize these notions have appeared over the years. For teachers wishing to incorporate the notions discussed here in their classroom, we would particularly recommend Jacques Aumont’s Aesthetics of Film (1992) for concepts related to cinematic identification, and Shohini Chaudhuri’s Feminist Film Theorists (2006) for an insightful outline of concepts associated to Feminist Film Theory. Furthermore, the Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes (2003), that has been put to use in the second part of this paper, constitutes in itself an interesting tool for teachers who wish to incorporate media stereotypical detection in their classrooms. These are but a very few examples of useful references; obviously there are many other writings that can be of assistance in integrating Film Studies paradigms within classroom activities. The overall target, according to us, is to provide teachers with basic
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knowledge that can be transmitted to students, allowing for classroom and homework assignments such as the pastiche activity we have shared here. Finally, while there still remains much to do with regards to the teaching of media literacy skills in the High Schools of most Western countries, we strongly believe that solutions to counter this situation exist and are easily achievable. Although it is highly doubtful that popular cultural discourses will be brought to change in the near future, preparing young students to adequately question them remains the paramount solution in shaping responsible and intellectually capable citizens.
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Poulin, Richard. Pornographie et hypersexualisation, Tome 2; Enfances dévastées. Ottawa: Les editions L’interligne, 2008. Scott, Ridley. Alien [video recording], 1979. Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. London & Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
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