Representation

We can say that all media are forms of representation. The people who are involved in making the representation are all governed by their own beliefs, values and attitudes. Most media products reporoduce dominant ideologies in the way that they represent the world, which has led to many complaining that they are misinterpreted in the media.

Gender
There are many different sterotypes of gender across different genres. I have done my own research into the symbol of the 'hero' character in films/tv shows, and what they represent as a character. Research suggests that Heroes have to be: intelligent, strong, resilent, selfless, caring, charismatic, reliable and inspiring. A Hero can be a simple sterotype, and as an audience, we recognise the hero. We see hero's in films like Gangster movies, Westerns, Action adventures and Spy films. Films like these show the individualistic battles over pride, honour and territory. Films make it seem normal for men to be heroic, brave, strong, individualistic etc, yet it is niot normal for a woman to be like this. However, music videos representation of gender seems to be polarized - men are aggresive whilst women are passive, men are portrayed as wanting to have sex with women whilst women are portrayed as sex objects, with emphasis on physical appearance.

Laura Mulveys Male Gaze
Mulvey suggested that women in film are represented as 'objects', images with visual and erotic impact, which she termed their 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. This  representation of women becomes evident in Christina Aguilera's 'Dirrty' music video:

In this music video, women are represented through the intra-diegetic gaze - when one character in the texts looks/gazes at another character in the text. Through the process of identification, this may lead to the spectator's gaze also. "Dirrty" creates a space in which feminine representations of sexual desire, vanity and prowess can be expressed. Christina calls upon her "girls" to crash the male dominated sphere of social inhibition to "make some noise". This dialectic process is symbolized in the opening sequence in which close up shots of Redman's rapping mouth are parallel edited with shots of Chrstina's own mouth as she introduces the song. We see continuous close-up shots of different parts of her body, limited clothing and outfit changes. The concept of this music video is how women are dominant of men, and it is the men we see gazing at the women, which also makes us, the audience, encouraged to look at Christina. As she is let out of the cage an onto the boxing ring, we get a sense that she is being percieved almost like a wild animal, being freed as the crowd roars in awe of her. However, there has been much controversy with this music video, as it is quite explicit, unsuitable for daytime TV.

Another example of gender representation is Girls Aloud - Something Kinda Ooo. This video is very sterotypically protraying gender. I watched this video in order to compare to The Saturdays different videos. I could tell that these two girl groups are very different. In the early days of Girls Aloud, their music videos were very much fixated on the male gaze, close-ups of lips, stomache, legs, eyes etc. In this particualr video we see the girls driving fast cars, looking very glamorous. The roles have reversed from men driving fast cars to women. This video is very different to the music video that I have planned for my filming. The girls in my video will not be portrayed as sex objects, or for any voyeristic pleasure, as The Saturdays music videos in general are not like that. However they do fixate on the looks of each girl, which is what I will focus on in my filming.