Theorist

Laura Mulvey - The Male Gaze 1975

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

The Gaze is a concept of how the audience views the people presented to them, when its women presented it can be looked at in three ways:

• how men look at women
• how women look at themseleves
• how women look at other women

Laura Mulvey's theory of the Male Gaze is that the audience is forced to view the people presented to them from a males point of view andthat the media is made by men for men. Women are objectified for men's pleasure.

Richard Dyer

Richard Dyer specialises in cinema; Queer Theory and the relationship between entertainment and representation in race, sexuality and gender.

‘How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. How we see them comes from representation’

For example if a man has only seen how women are treated on television he would perhaps think that women are not equal and that men are of more importance.
The Queer Theory is the idea that all identities are very different and they vary in many ways, this therefore means you can not refer to a group of people colectively, such as 'women' as not all women have a fixed identity so it doesn't determine who they are.

George Gerbner - Cultivation Theory (1960's)

The Cultivation Theory is that the TV has long term effects but does this gradually over time, this reinforces dominate ideologies. This is also known as the 'drip drip' theory. This leaves the audience with a misperception of the world and the people who have been represented to them.


Henry Jenkins 
This is the theory that the audience participate in representation of themselves and is an extension of self representation. The audience will see a media text and recreate this, using all different types of media.


Daniel Chandler - Media Semiotics 
This is the theory that all representations are a construction of reality.

'Rather than reproducing the "world" spontaneously and automatically, as the ideology of realism would have the spectator believe, the cinematic apparatus always operates selectively, limiting, filtering and transforming the images that are its raw material' (Rodowick 1994, 77).

The signifier is the object itself, this could be an image, a tatoo, the way someone is dressed or an advert on TV.
The signified is the message conveyed by the signifier, this is the meaning we give to it and understand.

For example in this picture the signifier is what we see, a group of boys making similar gestures with their hands, with they're hoods up covering most of their face's and wearing dark clothing.

the signified is a gang as this is the meaning we give when we see this.


Roland Barthes - Mythologies 
This is the theory that all representation in a mythical way or a fairy-tale portrayal of the person or place. However this looks like what it is representing but it isn't.

Anthony Giddens 


 Michel faucoult 
This is the theory that our identity isn't fixed on factors such as gender, age, race or sexuality. This does not define who we are, and there is no fixed boundaries to categories such as with the idea of collective identity, which he disagreed with. He also says that identity is used to exercise power over people in order to prevent them from going outside the fixed boundaries.

John Berger (1972)

John Berger focuses on the 'Ways Of Seeing' men look at women, and women see themselves being looked at by men and they are aware that they are being seen from a males point of view.


Jean Baudrillard