What’s the message?

How does the media influence you?

LO: To explore David Gauntlett’s theory of audience vs media power and apply

to Andrea Arnold’s films

David Gauntlett’s theories of media power vs audience power

Gender & Identity theory

Who do you think has more power in the construction of someone’s identity – the audience or the media?

Audiences are active

• Popular media has a significant relationship with people's sense of gender and identity. Media messages are diverse and contradictory. Rather than being zapped straight into people's brains, ideas about lifestyle and identity that appear in the media are resources which individuals use to think through their sense of self and modes of expression. Different aspects of popular media can aid or disturb these processes of contemporary reorientation. Some critics say that the media should offer traditional role models and reassuring certainties, but this view is unlikely to survive. Radical uncertainties and exciting contradictions are what contemporary media, like modern life, is all about.Do you agree with this?

Media power vs Audience power

• The power relationship between media and the audience involves 'a bit of both', or to be more precise, a lot of both. The media disseminates a huge number of messages about identity and acceptable forms of self-expression, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle. At the same time, the public have their own even more robust set of diverse feelings on these issues. The media's suggestions may be seductive, but can never simply overpower contrary feelings in the audience. Neither the media nor the audience are powerful in themselves, but both have powerful arguments.What constructions/messages in WASP could affect the audience’s identity? What do the characters do that might make us think about our own behaviour, appearance, lifestyle?

Fluidity of identity and the decline of tradition

• Today the mass media is a force for change. The traditional view of a woman as a housewife or low-status worker has been kick-boxed out of the picture by the feisty, successful 'girl power' icons. Meanwhile the masculine ideals of absolute toughness, stubborn self-reliance and emotional silence have been shaken by a new emphasis on men's emotions, need for advice, and the problems of masculinity. Although gender categories have not been shattered, these alternative ideas and images have at least created space for a greater diversity of identities.

• Modern media has little time or respect for tradition. The whole idea of traditions comes to seem quite strange. Why would we want to do the same as previous generations? What's so great about the past? Popular media fosters the desire to create new modes of life.

Can you apply this to any of the films we’ve studied?

Girl Power• One of the most obvious developments in recent pop culture has been the

emergence of the icons and rhetoric of 'girl power', a phrase slapped into mainstream culture by the Spice Girls and subsequently incorporated into the language of government bodies as well as journalists, educationalists, culture critics, and pop fans themselves. Magazines for young women are emphatic in their determination that women must do their own thing, be themselves, and/or be as outrageously sassy and sexy as possible. Several recent movies have featured self-confident, tough, intelligent female lead characters . Female pop stars sing about financial and emotional independence, inner strength, and how they don't need a man; and the popular mantra of self-help books is that women can become just as powerful as these icons, if they cultivate their confidence and self-belief, and draw up a plan of self-development. This set of reasonably coherent messages from a range of sources - their clarity only disturbed by the idea that women can be extremely tough and independent whilst also maintaining perfect make-up and wearing impossible shoes - seems to have had some impact on the identities of young women , as well as being very successful within pop culture as an image/lifestyle idea.

Can you apply this to any of the films we’ve studied?

Masculinity in crisis

• Contemporary masculinity is often said to be 'in crisis'; as women become increasingly assertive and successful, apparently triumphing in all roles, men are said to be anxious and confused about what their role is today. Signs that men’s magazines were about men finding a place for themselves in the modern world. These lifestyle publications were perpetually concerned with how to treat women, have a good relationship, and live an enjoyable life. Rather than being a return to essentialism - i.e. the idea of a traditional 'real' man, as biology and destiny 'intended‘ men's magazines have an almost obsessive relationship with the socially constructed nature of manhood.

Can you apply this to any of the films we’ve studied?

Gauntlett’s theoryTheory FOR AGAINST

Decline in Tradition Independent teenager – fends for herselfTamara Drewe – rises above the bullies to be a success

Fish Tank – lower class, on benefits, stay at home single MumWASP – relies on Dave to feed themTamara Drewe – Beth – stereotypical housewife

Girl Power FT – dresses like she wants Tomboy –strengthTD – strong and independent financially

WASP – provocative, conforming – attention seekingTD – nose job!!!!!!!WASP – not coping – man rescues her

Masculinity in Crisis WASP – two women fighting – man stands And watchesTD – affair made known – man is left lost

WASP – Dave looks after themTD – having the affairFT – abusing his role and sexuality

HMK

• On your blogs post a reflective paragraph on how Gauntlett’s 3 gender theories applied to the clip on ‘My Name is Joe’ and the representation of Britishness.

• &

• Watch RED ROAD