Research Technique for Creative Media Production (Unit 2)

"To what extent does the representation of women in contemporary R'n'B music videos present stereotypically dominant views of female sexuality?"


To being looking into the question above, I firstly needed to choose a selection of music videos that I feel best present or oppose the themes and ideas. (Further down this page all the music videos have been embeded in the essay.) The chosen videos are: Destiny's Child, Survivor (2001), Nelly, Tip Drill (2003), N.E.R.D, Lap Dance (2001) and The Aphex Twin, Windowlicker (1999). For some Primary research, I also did some analysis of the music videos to back up any points I make with evidence from the videos, in the form of technical aspects i.e. close-up shots of the female form. 

I began the basis of the my research by doing secondary research and looking into a document titled Dreamworlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power. Below is a short video introducing the main ideas behind it. This along with a power point breaking down Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema essay, gave me all the basic information I needed to begin looking deeper into the theory and expanding my research.


From here, I used this basic information gathered from secondary resources as a starting point to deepen my research and begin formulating my own ideas. I did some background research on the videos themselves (i.e. director) and found the lyrics to the tracks. This was to ensure that all discussion of the videos would be detailed.

IMDB - good background information
on each music video.
After gathering such information, I looked deeper into Mulvey's theory and this led me to Naomi Wolf's 'Beauty Myth'. In this study, Naomi Wolf makes connections between female liberation and female beauty.

 ‘the sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality – which for the first time in women’s history artificially links a commodified “beauty” directly and explicitly to sexuality.

This is one quote I picked out to use in my own work. I feel this idea is one that would be interesting to continue with. 

I then proceeded to use the internet to help me find if others had written on this topic. By finding other essays on similar themes I would be have other options to either back up my ideas or oppose them creating good argument for my essay and ensuring its validity.

Dictionary 
During my research I came across phrases I had not come across before and there had to exoand my research further in order to fully understand the articles in which I found them.

For example, Faux-Naif: 'a person who pretends to be ingenuous'
                          Scopophilia: 'Denoting fondness, especially an                  abnormal fondness for a specific thing.'








During the time I was researching for this project, BBC 2 aired a programme titled, ?????, this programme looked into how woman on television were represented. The programme looked at series such as Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. Though the documentary was not focussed on Music Videos, I decided to watch and note-take on this programme to see if it would have anything of use for my own essay, I felt I main gain some additional ideas that may aid further research.


Please see link for full essay. 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1joQre2b8KOSVVIMnRQam5NaWM/edit?usp=sharing



         Female exploitation is something that has been questioned for many years, particularly when looking into popular culture and media forms. One area in which this is questioned on a regular basis would be that of the music video, with specific genres being criticised more often than others. One of the most common genres that lead to questionable female portrayal is hip-hop/R’n’B. It would appear that objectifying women in such videos has become something of a convention for this genre, surprisingly also including the videos of female artists. I aim to look into how accurate we would be if were to say that the representation of woman in R'n'B music videos presents a stereotypically dominant view of female sexuality and in either conclusion, the reasons why woman are portrayed and portray themselves in such a way.
            This leads me to discuss my first video, Destiny’s Child’s 2001 hit, ‘Survivor.’ The lyrics in this song speak of female empowerment, surviving on their own. Opening the song with ‘Now that you’re out of my life, I’m so much better. You thought that I’d be weak without you, but I’m stronger’. 




Despite this idea of female emancipation that the lyrics would suggest, I can’t help but feel that the camera work and mise-en-scene of the video are somewhat contradictory. Right from the outset of the video, we are bombarded with close-ups and panning shots of the women’s bodies (face, neck, torso.). Most of these are also in slow motion, a technique that is adopted by filmmakers that further emphasises the sexuality of the woman on screen. This mirrors the way in which women are often represented in many male artist R’n’B videos. For example, N.E.R.D’s ‘Lap dance’ (though admittedly this is an extreme case), shows continuous cut-aways and close-ups of the female form.  According to ‘Dreamworlds 3’ this fragmentation of the female body is ‘symptomatic of the pornographic gaze’.





One major difference though would be that in the case of ‘Lap dance’ we rarely see the women’s faces, this dehumanises the woman making them an object. As one study says, it ‘reduces the women to a collection of parts, something less than human’ and further adding that ‘it also promotes the treatment of them as in human play’.
The fragmentation of the female body through close-ups and editing, emphasises the desires of the suggested audience (i.e. heterosexual male), suggesting that the filmmakers are satisfying similar voyeuristic audience gratifications. The same goes for another of my studied texts, Nelly’s 2003, ‘Tip Drill’. The title in itself suggests a disrespectful nature towards women. The phrase ‘Tip Drill’ is a reference to women who have sex with multiple men in exchange for money. The sense of distain is emphasised by the shot in which we see Nelly swipe a credit card through the backside of one of the female performers, this clearly suggesting the objectification of the woman as something to buy and use.

 The Destiny’s Child ‘Survivor’ video is also guilty of this, the video may suggest female empowerment but it still indulges in the most obvious of male fantasies. The women are dressed in provocative army wear. Conventionally women have very restricted roles in such videos, i.e. partying, stripping or they are seen kissing, touching other woman or multiple woman surrounding men. All of which are stereotypically heterosexual male fantasies. Woman are there to ‘titillate male viewers’  hence, dressing in such a provocative way. Several of these fantasies are played out in both Nelly’s ‘Tip Drill’ and N.E.R.D’s ‘Lap dance’ (i.e. being surrounded by semi-naked woman and seeing woman kissing other woman). We also see this in The Aphex Twin video for ‘Windowlicker’, however, the extreme exaggeration of these conventions suggesting an edge of mockery. This video is full to the brim of hyperbole and satire, giving it a comedic value rarely found in other videos of the genre. This is made clear from the beginning of the video when we see an almost cartoon-like stretched limousine move through the frame for almost 20 secs. Chris Cunningham, director of this video appears to be acknowledging all of the conventions of the Hip-Hop/R’n’B music video but by exaggerating and mocking them, can we the suggest he his making a statement to oppose such conventions? Or is this simple the unusual and surreal style that seems to appear in all his work. If this is a comment on the usual style taken up by the genre, what reason does he have for this?








The imagery used throughout the Destiny’s Child video for ‘Survivor’ has similar connotations to that of the above videos. We literally see a man spying on the women as they fight their way through the island. This is a very literal reference to the idea of voyeurism. It could be argued that because this video is made by a male director, Darren Grant, we are seeing his idea (or fantasy) of how women would survive on a deserted Island and it is for this reason that we see them in this overly sexualized manor, this helps to answer the question I originally posed. 
        The way that the women in ‘Survivor’ are dressed and perform is something to be noted. Throughout the video, the women wear very little clothing, for example at the beginning, the clothes they are in are soaking wet and torn, showing off their bodies. Their performances are conventional of the genre, with choreographed, provocative dance routines at the beginning and the end, this is a convention that is carried though the genre, if we were to look at another artist, such as Ne-Yo or Chris Brown etc we would see that many of the video’s would include dance routines. In the case of the ‘Survivor’ video, the group performs in a seductive, provocative manner. Looking at the beginning of the video again, we see BeyoncĂ© down on hands and knees crawling out of the ocean. The way the camera is placed when filming her means that the audience can see down her top, emphasizing her sexuality and focusing heavily on her body, satisfying the desire of the presumed heterosexual male audience. This idea that the audience is predominantly heterosexual males comes from a theory compiled by Laura Mulvey called ‘The Male Gaze’. The exaggerated sexualisation of the female performers satisfies the sexual desire of its audience voyeurism. Mulvey says in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, ‘women displayed as sexual objects is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle.' At one point in the video the woman are dancing around tree trunks, this strongly resembles the act of pole dancing, leading again to the suggestion that woman are the object of sexual desire and that often these music videos can often have similarities to pornography. What is interesting about this video is the contradiction of action and lyric as mention earlier, the female artists clearly come across as in control and empowered, but it would seem that the only way they feel they can achieve this is by using their sexuality, surely this is a backwards step? Is it that ‘feminism’ now means that men are no longer required to objectify women, they can do it themselves? and should this be true, does this not defeat the object of feminism? Have we now entered an era of post-feminism? In her book “The Beauty Myth’, Naomi Wolf makes some suggestions about female liberation being linked to female beauty. She writes: ‘the sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality – which for the first time in women’s history artificially links a commodified “beauty” directly and explicitly to sexuality.’ 
 This is definitely notable with regard to the question of why women may feel using their sexuality gains them independence.
            The female vocalist in the N.E.R.D’s ‘Lap dance’ video adds to this idea that women would seem to be accepting of the fact that in mens eyes, women are mere objects. Though she is significantly more covered up than the other woman in the video, she would appear to consider herself as nothing more than an object of desire for the men. Her lyrics repeat themselves, ‘Ooo baby you want me?’ and ‘You can get this lap dance here for free’ blatantly teasing the men to gain their approval and attention. Leading to the question of why she appears to be accepting this kind of behaviour.This bring me back to idea of female empowerment only being women’s acceptance of objectivity and not an end to it. Can we say that the women in these videos are faux-naif?  That is to say they knowingly objectifying themselves, being ‘artificially naive’  for the benefit of the men. If this is the case, we would have to question why the women would take on this simple role. Not only is she approving of the objectification of herself but also of the other woman in the video. She bears no objection to the fact that women are actively exaggerating their sexuality and happy to use there bodies for the benefit of men. Does this make her feel more successful? It is no secret that female artists use their sexuality to sell their ‘brand’. And in fact this runs much further afield than just the likes of R’n’B artists. Britney Spears is an obvious example of this, even in her first music video for ‘Hit Me Baby (One More Time)’ she is satisfying a common male fantasy as she is dressed in school girl attire. A study carried out by two University of Missouri researchers found that ‘despite numerous existing sexual stereotypes regarding black women, they don’t appear to objectify themselves any more or less than women of other races.’ So with this seeming to run with females as a whole, we have to wonder why?


Focus Group:

By carrying out a focus group after we had done enough research to present ideas, it was a good opportunity to see whether other people had similar ideas with regard to how woman are represented in the media and specifically R'n'B music videos. The focus group as a whole was successful with regard to ideas and opinions that we gained. However, structurally, I feel for the sake of the recordings, we needed a little more organisation. For example, introducing each track before beginning discussion would have been helpful when listening back to evaluate the research. This group provided my research with a good primary source, which my work may otherwise have lacked. Something that I would ensure I did next time was to take notes during the focus group, I decided not too as the discussion was being recorded.

Each recording is focused on one of the chosen music videos. This first recording is for Destiny's Child, Survivor.


Focus Group - 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.



This recording (below) is for The Aphex Twin, Windowlicker. 


Focus Group - 2 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


Nelly, Tip Drill


Focus Group - 3 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


N.E.R.D, Lapdance


Focus Group - 4 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

Evaluation of focus group reseach:

Throughout the group I picked up on several opinions that reflected the ideas I had presented in own essay. Take the discussion of Destiny's Child's Survivor, the point that came up was about whether the song truly reflected female empowerment as the lyrics would suggest. The response to this was that though the lyrics do tell us that the woman can survive on their own, the imagery actually suggests otherwise. One of the first things that was picked up on this topic was how 'scantily clad' the woman were. This mirrors the ideas posed in the recording about Nelly's Tip Drill. When asked about the lyrics sung by a female vocalist, 'It must be ya money, cause it ain't ya face', we posed the idea that perhaps woman are using the men for their money just as much as men use woman for their bodies. The group responded to this by saying 'lyrically,yes. Imagery, no.' This led us to discuss whether woman are now using their sexuality as a form of liberation (a theory I picked up from Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth). One member of the group said, 'It is the only way the can become famous'. However, in oppostion to this, it was also mentioned that often artists themselves have no real input into how they are portrayed in the media through music videos and other forms. When asked who portrayed them this way, one person mentioned the record labels. Often these videos have male directors, perhaps this has an effect on why woman are represented in such an overly sexualised manner.
When discussing N.E.R.D's Lapdance, it was pointed out that the lyrics to this track are actually making a comparison between the government and a lapdance. This is something I had not found through my research and only realised during this focus group but provided an extra dimension to discussion.When the point had been made I asked the group why they thought a relatively serious subject would be presented in such a way? i.e. sexualised. One member responded with, 'sex makes everyone listen'. An interesting point to make, clearly people find this type of video far more entertaining and so to make something of a political point N.E.R.D made use of female sexuality. When listening back over the recordings, I found this point brought me back to the idea of woman using sexuality for liberation. If 'sex makes people listen' then perhaps this is the reason behind woman seemingly accepting the use of their bodies to encourage their success.
A lot of interesting points came up when after showing the group the video for The Aphix Twin's Windowlicker. The most obvious point to bring up first was whether or not the video was being satirical of the conventional R'n'B video. This led to why and how it was mocking the genre. Obviously, the female face metamorphosing into an ugly male is the most striking aspect of the video. When asking the group about this technique, it was suggested that it emphasises the way in which other video's strongly focus of the female body and not the face. This almost dehumanises them, presenting them as a mere object of lust as oppose to human beings. Due to the fact the a technical convention that film makers use is to portray feelings with close-ups of the face, particularly the eyes so by not including these features, female emotions in this video are almost non-existent. The male faces exaggerate this point by making them the focus of the image simply because it is unusual and therefore noticeable. The fact that it takes the men in the video the duration of the track to notice the faces again points out how objectified woman are in the music videos and the media as a whole. However, despite the video making these points, the video in itself is still objectifying woman, if not equally then more so than other videos as their faces are taken away altogether. It was pointed out that at the beginning of the video, it is two black woman that the men are trying to 'pick up', should this be noticed? In response to this one member of the focus group stated that it is 'living up to a racial stereotype'.



Critical Evaluation:


The beginning of my research began by using sources provided to me to give me basic knowledge of the subject matter. After reading through this source material and taking notes from it, I was able to take this basic knowledge and expand it to be much more detailed. In the Dreamworlds 3 file and documentary I was given, several theories were mentioned that I then went and researched separately. For example, Voyeurism (something that strongly linked with Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasures essay). As this came up in both Mulvey's theory and the Dreamworlds document, I used the Google search engine to gain more detail on the theory. I already had some knowledge of it meaning, however, I wanted to see if I could find anything that linked it with the subject of my own research. Through this search I came across a blog post of a media student (http://sophiya-a2media.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/goodwinmulveys-theory-of-voyeurism.html) discussing voyuerism with regard to the media. This particular article was of great help to my own research, IT introduced to a theorist named Andrew Goodwin, his book Dancing in the Distraction Factory (1992) has good discussion surrounding the music video with good reference to how woman are represented making for a great source for my work. Another theory that I was able to look into after reading this post was that of the 'female gaze'. This theory suggests that in more modern media, the male form 'can also act as a form of sexual pleasure', giving examples such as Justin Timberlake. I felt by looking more into this I would be able to apply good argument to my work when comparing the male/female gaze.
During the course of my research another article I came across on the internet proved to add yet more depth to the basic information I had already gathered. 'With the demeamour of an R'n'B singer' (http://samanthachioma.com/2011/05/19/with-the-demeanour-of-an-rnb-singer/) is a blog post that links directly with the subject of my research. A particular quote that interested me was "'feminism' appears to mean that we no longer require men to objectify us, we can do it just right all by ourselves."This got me thinking about the reasons why it would appear that woman are seemingly happy to objectifying themselves. This lead me back to one of my original sources, Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth. I also found myself coming across the theory of post-feminism. More research into these new ideas preceded.
The outset of my research began well, I was able to find several different resources for information, though admittedly far too much of this was obtained via the internet. For future reference I must ensure that my research sources are more varied, journals and documentaries (I only found one in addition the dreamworlds documentary provided) are something that I did not make enough use off for this task. Several different theories that would aid my own ideas and offer a good structure for my essay were found. However, as I began writing (as you will see from reading my work) I found myself struggling to fit all the pieces together. I decided to then choose one theory specifically to discuss and try to use the others to back up main points. I felt this would give my work much more direction and structure instead of just talking about everything all at once. I decided to focus on the idea of woman objectifying themselves as I found this the most interesting of all information I had gathered.


One of first things I picked up on when beginning this evaluation was that all of the music videos I chose to look at were all made between 1999 and 2003. This limits the validity of my research as I it provide a good enough idea of how the representation of woman may have changed over the years. If, for example, I had taken a recent Rhianna video and an older Madonna video, I would have been able to compare and contrast to give me a more accurate conclusion to my work. In my opinion seeing how the representation has changed is an important aspect of this research as it would give a better idea of why woman have come to be represented in such a manor assuming that the representation has changed. As mentioned earlier my research would have benefitted from a more varied range of resources. Though I had sources from a range of media's, for example blogs, books documentaries, more of each type would have helped with the accuracy of my research. This is something that I most certainly bare in mind for the next research task I carry out. Much of my research has been complied from text-based secondary sources, this limits the variation of research I could have obtained, making for a less reliable report. More primary research would be necessary, should I carry another research task such as this in the future as the only primary source I had was that of the focus group. Though I feel this aided my research, giving me information that helped validate my own ideas and offered strong arguments against them, I feel more primary sources would have been of great help. Perhaps, something more quantitative would have added an extra dimension to my work, i.e. a questionnaire to find out information such as the target audience of the videos. Though I collected a fairly good amount of information for my essay, I found that I did not make use of every source, this is something that could have been improved as using more sources would have made my own work more reliable. A final point to make about the essay as a whole would be that I feel I needed to refer back to my original question more often. After reading it back, I feel that I often slip away from the specific genre I aimed to look into and instead discussed female representation in the media as a whole. Should I do this again, keeping on the path of the question I set out to answer would need to be focussed on.


No comments:

Post a Comment