Dave Chappelle – Mad Real World

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[becka] – Week 7 – Dick Hebdige – The Function of Subculture

This week’s reading has probably been, for me, the most enjoyable reading so far. The study of subcultures is a topic is easier for me to understand as I’ve always identified myself as a member of some subculture or other, be it Punk or Psychobilly, bodymods or ‘extreme sports’ – but the reading takes the concept of ‘subculture’ back to it’s roots, in 1950’s Teddy Boys (the British version of Rockabilly) and 1960’s Mods.

In post-war Britain, the concept of a ‘teenager’ was first appearing, and younger people with disposable income were becoming a major consumer force. Markets quickly capitalised on this new social identity, and produced goods to fill the niche, and produced images and concepts to create new niches to fill (see Marxism/reverse Marxism).

Hebdige goes on to explain that subcultures existed initially and predominantly as a rebellion, essentially, against one’s parents; be it their beliefs, dress, class identifications or otherwise. The examination of Mod culture was also an interesting insight; living in a city such as Brighton, one can find resounding relevance to the ’64 riots, and the strong following of Mod culture in the UK.

I was particularly interested in the examination of the ‘first wave’ of Punk as being a crystallisation of the feeling for a degenerated Britain. These youths wore their opinions in the form of dyed hair, ripped clothing and ‘outlandish’ appearances. One could argue that Punk was no more than a trend, a product of fashion. Anyone familiar with the story of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren will also know about the shop, named ‘SEX’ that sold safety pinned, deconstructed clothing designed by Westwood. It was her partner in business, Malcolm Mclaren, who was the manager of the manufactured Punk band, the Sex Pistols – possibly the most successful marketing tool of all time. One can easily distinguish between the diverse roots of Punk – those inspired by the Sex Pistols and such come from a standpoint of a ‘shocking appearance’ and ‘bold social statement.’ Quite often, one of the most fundamental influences in Punk, arguably all ‘guitar based’ music, is forgotten. The Clash (Combat Rock, London Calling) started life as ‘The 101ers’, and were influenced heavily by Jamaican music, such as roots, ska and reggae. Unlike the Pistols’ anarchistic and anti-establishmentarian lyrics, The Clash wrote of real issues, including the Gulf War, and responses to Thatcherism.

The discussions on the origins of Punk could last forever, so I’ll leave it there.

[becka] – Week 6 reading – Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu’s reading was accessibly and fairly easy to understand. The overtone of the piece is the focus on the content and nature of ‘culture’ – what cultural capital is, and the concept of understanding art, explained through semiotics.

Bourdieu mentions ‘ciphers’ and ‘codes’ as a means of viewing objects, namely art. He goes on to say that one can derive a basic pleasure from viewing art with an untrained eye, but that true appreciation of art (or at least, a higher level of appreciation) could only be experienced by individuals who had an understanding of a ‘code’ – to exemplify, someone with no basis in the understanding of painting may not fully appreciate a painting as a piece of art, or may only gain aesthetic pleasure from it. Conversely, someone who is either a painter, or who has the cultural capital to appreciate paintings may see deeper levels of mastery within the object that they are observing. Once again, these are the basic principles of semiotic analysis.

Bourdieu also mentions the nature of classism, quoting that ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’ He moves on to distinguish between the nature of taste, and how necessity and commodity are phenomena that further classify people: for instance, the difference between eating economic foods which give energy and are filling, and eating luxurious foods which may be neither economic nor filling (i.e. haute cuisine) but which are pleasing in both aesthetics and flavour. The act of eating goes from being functional to ritualised.

[becka] Reading 2 – Steve Neale

Steve Neale’s ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’ was, for me, an infinitely more accessible read than Mulvey’s essay. The construction was logical and well laid out, the opinions and statements were well argued and evenly balanced, and the piece had no overall feel of being jaded and somewhat ‘bitter.’ It also starts by raising an extremely important point: the critical analyses of films in regards to the objectification of women is essentially a pointless practice. Mulvey’s attempts to create a discourse which examines the role of the female as one who is inferior to and oppressed by the male breaks no new grounds, because she still gives the male character the position of the ‘norm’ – omnipotent, powerful, dominant, the chaser, the voyeur. It would be far more revealing to deeply examine the nature of the heterosexual male in popular cinema, which is what Neale has begun to do with in the given extract of his work.

Neale also takes the idea of the ‘gaze’ further by suggesting that there is validity in the idea that the male gaze upon heterosexual male film characters also ventures into the realms of voyeurism and also feeds a narcissistic urge that may not be immediately obvious. Neal speaks of how, within fight scenes common to the ‘Western’ genre of film, the sight of powerful male characters being physically destroyed can relate to an image of castration, and the destruction of ego and narcissism. He goes on to further relate the male on male gaze as that of nurturing a narcissistic desire – similar to Mulvey’s mention of Freud’s ‘mirror recognition’ moment – the point in time when a person first sees themselves projected, and perceives their projection to something more perfect that they understand themselves to be. The characters in films are the vessels for this projection – the creator of the film dictates who the characters are, and to an extent, how an audience or individual should feel about them, but ultimately this is something that cannot be controlled on a personal level. If an individual identifies more with an antagonist than a protagonist, it’s an entirely personal direction whose solipsistic roots can only be understood (maybe even if only subconsciously) by the individual viewing the character.

[vicki] The Transgender Gaze In ‘Boys Don’t Cry’

This reports looks at director Kimberley Peirce’s construction of a ‘transgender gaze’ in the film Boys Don’t Cry…

• ‘temporarily disarms the compulsory heterosexuality of the romance genre’
• Traditional dynamics of looking turned on its head as it is male protagonist Brandon who represents ‘the general condition of incompleteness’ with Lana (a female character) representing the ‘fantasy of wholeness’
• It is outlined that Lana’s ability to appear naked whereas Brandon’s trauma in doing so illustrates this unconventional contrast
• The transgender gaze of Brandon is later converted to a lesbian and therefore a female gaze. Lana is at this point interacting with Brandon’s character as though he were a woman…referring to her as ”pretty”
• The transgender subject is here, dependent on the recognition of a woman (Lana’s ability to see Brandon as he sees himself)

[becka] Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

I found the majority of this reading very hard to understand. It wasn’t so much the abundance of large words crammed together, so much

as it was the concepts. I have gleaned that Mulvey is trying to assert that because women don’t have penises, they are somehow (viewed by
men as being) evil. That somehow, the absence of a phallus is demonic, or a reason to demonise. I can’t really get my head around this
concept, despite the explanations given by Mulvey. How can a woman be ‘castrated’ when there is nothing there in the first place? Why must
being a woman be the same as an entity who is lacking, as opposed to different? Are men evil because they do not have breasts?
I vaguely understood the concept of scopophilia and voyeurism, and understood their place in film, but found it hard to link this to female
castration – I do understand however, the objectification of the woman. This does however, seem to be a status quo of sorts, and it has
never much occurred to me, beyond occasional thoughts that the female protagonists of films are never more than a UK size 8/10, and are
always ‘attractive’ in some qualifiable manner.
This reading did remind me fleetingly of an analysis of female and male iconography in film:
the example was the Star Wars trilogy, directed by George Lucas. It appeared that every time there was an event of a perilous or dramatic
nature, it involved a cavernous hole (A New Hope (1977): Luke must fire into a small exhaust hole to blow up the Death Star – The Empire
Strikes Back (1980) – “Luke, I am your father”, Luke Skywalker falls into an enormous ventilation tunnel, Return of the Jedi (1983), Vader
throws Palpatine into another giant ventilation shaft where he falls to his death – The Phantom Menace (1999), Darth Maul is bisected in an
act of furious vengeance by Obi Wan Kenobi, and falls into another enormous ventilation shaft.) After analysis of these scenes, it was
suggested that George Lucas perhaps feared his mother in his youth, owing to his fear of holes (an allusion to a vaginal image, perhaps).
The links to Freudian theories do make sense to me – I have a basic understanding of Freud’s studies, although I’m disinclined to agree
with them – his obsession with childhood sexuality can be frankly quite ‘creepy’ at times – and I have no understanding of Mulvey’s theories
of linking female castration to the woman’s nature as ‘the bearer of the bleeding wound’ – by which I can only assume Mulvey is alluding to
menstruation or childbirth. The examples of Hitchcock films helps to bring the essay into context for me – Examples such as Vertigo and Rear
Window were lost on me in relation to the male as the detective and the female as the criminal, although Psycho, I believe, does exemplify
this theory well. I can also understand Mulvey’s referencing of Budd Boetticher’s theory that a woman in a film is an object, a mere catalyst
for the disruption of and restoration to the state of equilibrium in the male protagonist’s character.
More posts will follow on the week’s second and third set readings.

I just want to say that wordpress is still really irritating. Why can’t you mess around with fonts and justify text? Pfft.

Week 4…Feminism

This weeks reading is on Feminist media studies and explores the narrative of femininity within various media texts eg. Soaps and Romantic fiction. Looking at the media from this point of view means adopting some of the Marxist and Neo-Marxist frameworks from previous weeks’ readings. This text was sure to cover the reception of such texts as well as the narrative structure in regards to production. This is important as the ways in which a text is intended for its audiences is not always the way it is recieved by these viewers

Joel week 4 Narrating femininity

In ‘Narrating Femininity’ Thornham examines different feminist analysis of narrative in media texts such as romance fiction, sit-coms and soap operas. Thornham uses feminist theorists to show differences in feminist analysis.

One part I found particularly interesting was the technique of analysing the function of the narrative structure in the writing of romance fiction as well as the way in which readers use this genre. Radway sees the narrative structure as reaffirming patriarchal structures in society. Radway says that the initial scenario of the unfulfilled heroine and emotionally repressed hero speak’s to women’s dissatisfaction with gendered relationships as currently structured within patriarchy, but it’s ‘magical solution’ reaffirms those very structures and their constructions of male and female identity. Radway concludes that romance fiction functions as ‘an active agent in the mainstream of the ideological status quo.’

However the chapter goes on to say how the readers of romance fiction see it as an empowering event that strengthens confidence and independence due to identification with the heroine’s qualities. Radway distinguishes between the meanings cut and the meanings of the text as a read; the former originates in an oppositional and utopian impulse, whilst the latter works to recuperate and disarm this impulse.

Chodorow takes a more extreme approach with the ‘object relations theory’. Chodorow gives an ideological reason for these narratives saying that they produce a desire for an emotionally fulfilling sexual relationship which can be fulfilled within patriarchal culture, which constucts masculinity in terms of distance, separation and control.

[vicki] Reading Week 3

John Fiske’s piece ‘Quizzical Pleasures’ explores the many types of quiz and game shows on offer in today’s world. One of the key points outlined is the relationship between the characteristics of these shows and that of the education system, which is seen to be neutral and unbiased, giving everyone equal opportunities of success (Bordieu). Whilst it is actually, according to Bordieu, promoting middle class values in the ways in which distinctions are made between the winners and losers. Fiske likens the role of the ‘star personality of the show’  to that of the teacher, through the ways in which they control access to academic knowledge upon which high value is placed.

Our attention is drawn to the different types of shows available, those concerned with factual knowledge (e.g Mastermind) and those which place value on human knowledge (e.g Play Your Cards Right). The latter I find interesting as they are able to deviate from the norm, where those with the most academic knowledge have more chance of overall success. They, on the other hand,  reward the ‘ordinary’; such as those able to predict social norms in the form of opinion polls. Mills and Rice (1982) label this knowledge as ‘more democratic’ in that the skills required are gained through social experience as opposed to ‘formally taught skills’ (which the middle class are likely to have longer experiences of).

I also liked the ways in which Fiske looked at the reception of such shows by audiences as well as their content. The difference between the viewing motivations of those from lower and higher socioecomomic groups are highlighted and seem to differ greatly. One of the key points I took from this reading is that even through these shows represented as testing the knowledge of the ordinary, the player is still being tested on their knowledge of the system over which producers and the ruling classes have the power.

[becka&joel]

Becka and Joel – Group discussion.

The reading dealt with the nature of game shows (quiz shows) and their relation to demographics, class difference and education in the context of class.

We were discussing whether the nature of a game show relates directly to the kinds of ‘prizes’ available from the show. Game shows which Fiske considers to be aimed at ‘the working classes’ tend to have prizes of material objects, holidays, commodities. Shows with a ‘higher calibre’ tend to have financial rewards, or nothing as a prize at all; simply to be the holder of a title of ‘the person who is best at this thing’ is the prize in itself – a mark of status.

We then went on to discuss the view displayed in the reading of how ‘luck’ (which is present in all games shows) plays a vital role in the hegemonic structure of societies. John Fiske claims that the dominant ideology insists that everyone has the chance to rise up in social class. According to Fiske, luck provides an ideological acceptable explanation of success or failure. The hegemonic function of luck demonstrates that the rewards of the system are available to all.