television soaps
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Television Soaps: The Cultural Construction of Gender and
Representation
Soaps but more importantly music videos can be said to
interrogate the
cultural construction of gender and representations of identity.
The video
suggests a set of images to the viewer and usually these are a
blurring of
gender and identity. Music videos predicate on the
representation of female
gender experience. The two interrelated sign systems- access
signs and
discovery signs- will be discussed. Music clips that will be
focused on are
Madonna's ‘Burning Up', ‘Express Yourself', and ‘Justify My
Love'. The singer,
who has been labelled ‘Our Lady of MTV', has an amazing video
appeal due to her
play with gender and identity. No other single artist has
produced as many
mixed images as she has.
Television soaps tend not to interrogate the construction of
gender and the
representation of identity. They do not seem to cross any
boundaries. People
watch soaps to relax and somehow relate, so if they were to
experiment with the
theatre of gender, it may be seen as a threat to viewers.
Soapies usually have
the males in typically male dominated occupations such as
doctors, car salesmen
and chefs. Women in soaps are usually secretaries or housewives.
There does
not seem to be any attempt for a switch of roles. Females are
feminine, males
masculine. There has been one exception, which was Kylie
Minogue's character,
Charlene, on Neighbours. She was a mechanic and tomboy. This is
one of the few
occasions where a soap has interrogated the cultural construction
of gender and
representation of identity.
A music video is footage that accompanies a song. They can
have a
storyline related to the song, displays of images or simply
focusing on the
artist/s performing. Music video is forever crossing the lines
of gender and
identity. It is able to do this as it is seen as a form of art,
therefore there
is no threat to viewers. It is ironic that Boy George has said
that “video was
the worst thing to happen to music”, when he himself looked and
acted like he
was crossing the lines of gender and boundaries back in the
1980's. Madonna is
most famous for creating videos with no boundaries for gender or
identity. Most
of the time, she deliberately plays with surfaces and masks.
Madonna visual
style engages and hyperbolises the discourse of femininity- she
has bleached
hair with dark roots, street smart image yet glamorous. Gender
play is the mix
and match of styles that flirt with the signifiers of sexual
difference, and
Madonna is always doing that. The three music videos of Madonna
to be analysed
a re `Burning Up', ‘Express Yourself', and `Justify My Love'.
Pouring money into the visuals, she is the first female
artist to fully
exploit video. In the three videos to be discussed, there is a
mixture of
suggestion and aggression. ‘Burning Up' involves her and a man.
She is
writhing in the middle of the road while he is driving towards
her. At the
moment where she seemed submissive, she was actually about to
take over-
suddenly he disappeared and at the end of the clip she was behind
the wheel. It
was like she was powerless, but then she turns that image upside
down by showing
who had the control. `Express Yourself' is very similar. It
shows her as being
powerful and also as being weak. She plays with gender through
her wearing of a
pin-striped suit ( the male sign of power and success) and her
crotch grabs. It
also shows her with a chain around her neck. Madonna says:
"It's just an image I thought was powerful It showed an
extreme. Extreme
images of women: one is in charge, in control, dominating; the
other is chained
to a bed "
It is evident in this video that she interrogates the
cultural construction
of gender and representations of identity. "Justify My Love" is
the same. The
banned video showed how gender roles could be swapped, blurred
and played with
to create different identities. It showed men who looked and
acted like women
and women who looked and acted like men. It totally changed the
typical gender
roles and behaviour around.
E. Ann Kaplan (1897) stated “Madonna's feminism is part of a
larger post-
modernism phenomenon which her videos also embody in their
blurring of
sacrosanct boundaries and polarities such as male/female, high
art/pop art,
film/TV, fiction/reality and private/public.
Two interrelated sign systems developed from videos
predicated on female
gender experience- access signs and discovery signs. These can
both be seen in
Cyndi Lauper's 1983 hit “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and
Madonna's 1984 song “
Borderline”. Both are set in the street not feeling threatened,
which is the
access sign. The discovery sign is being female. In
‘Borderline” it is the
fact she gets discovered to be a model.
