Kerrang

The Male Gaze Theory

Laura Mulvey

The male gaze

• Film represents women as passive objects of male desire.

• Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male even if they are indeed; heterosexual women or homosexual men.

Bell Hooks

• The colour codes: Lighter skinned women are considered more desirable and fit better into the western ideology of beauty.
• Black women are objectified and sexualised in hip-hop reflecting the colonialist view of black women (sexually disposable)
• Commodified blackness, a mediated view of black culture that is considered the norm.

Stuart Hall

• The media and therefore audiences often blur race and class. Often associating particular races with particular class.
• Audience reception theory; audiences read/understand a particular text according to their cultural upbringing.
• Western (white dominated) cultures. Continue to misinterpret ethnic minorities in the media due to underlying racist tendencies. Ethnic minorities are often represented as ‘the other’.

Audience Reception Theory

• A preferred reading (or dominant system of response) is a way of understand the text that s consistent with the ideas and intentions of the producer or creator of the product .This may lead to an acceptance of the dominant values within the text.
• With a negotiated reading (or subordinate response) the individual has a choice as to whether or not they accept the preferred reading as their own. 
• Audience members may read the text through the filter or their own personal agenda. 
• Although there may be an acceptance of the dominant values and existing social structure, the individual may be prepared to argue that a particular social group may be unfairly represented.
• In an oppositional reading (or radical response) individual members of an audience may completely reject the preferred reading of the dominant code and social values that produced it.

Hypodermic Theory

• The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with a message designed to trigger a response.

Moral Panic

• A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.