Theorised Creativity

Representation

Woman Clone

• The CD cover, in semiotic terms presents the band as a text and connotes the 'world of the text' in ways that are both straightforwardly feminist - dealing with the representation of women as clones, as commodities and as objects - and at the same time postmodern and post feminist
• The audience is not expected to be exposed here to the idea that women are reperesented in traditional ways for the first time, but that this representation of a media reality is actually a return to a feminist perspective in the context of a backlash against feminism
• In post-feminist environment, women are seen as complicit.
• The 1990's 'girl power' culture was a manifestation of this, through which females are represented as seeking equality, but at the same time dressing and appearing in ways which are keeping with the male gaze.
• The blending of the CD cover with these band member images, and the punk aesthetic of the music itself, delibaretly complicates the meaning of 'Woman Clone' and plays with gender representation to displace the audience.
• Barthes - 'Striptease is based on a contradiction. Women is desexualised at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say taht we are dealing here with a spectactle based on fear.'
• Roland Barthes (French Structuralist writer) - giving an example of mythologies - a seminal theory outlining the way that media representations relate to broader cultural myths and belief systems
• 'In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly' - Mulvey in Humm 1992
• Laura Mulvey - men look at women and the media reinforce this by filming or photographing women from a male point of view - so the norm for media representation is that the camera is male.
• Feminism itself is a misunderstood and derided political project, often undermined by the very people it seeks to liberate - women.
• 'Historically people and movements have been called feminist when they recognised the connections between social inequalities, deprivations and oppressions and gender differences. Currently feminists are pursuing questions about the consequences for women and fo men when gender oppressions intersect with other forms of oppression, with homophobia, classism, ageism, disability and racism' - Humm
• There is more symbolic oppression in the media than at the time of Humm's description, as we add the xenophobic reaction to Islam in the post 9/11 context and the gradual erosion of civil liberties which is partly facilitated by media representations of 'the threat'.

Audience

• How do people make sense of and give meaning to cultural products
• 'Pop stars are, to some extent, symbolic vehicles with which young women understand themselves more fully, even if, by doing so, they partly shape their personalities to fit the stars alleged preferences' - Paul Willis
• Interplay between pop idol, female fans and media is already knowing and ironic, but nevertheless the symbolic exchange of gendered meanings around music is still powerful