Representation Issues

Music videos generally reveal messages and values from the film-makers perspective. This is good to analyse how representation issues are portrayed.

Music videos generally use the “gaze theory” to attract and capture the interest of their audience. The gaze theory is related to Sigmund Freud’s concept of Voyeurism to refer to the pleasure that can be gained by looking at a sexual object.

One version of the gaze theory is the “male gaze” that is to do with using a female body in a video to create a powerful controlling gaze at the female on display. An example of this is Christina Aguilera’s 2002 hit; Dirrty. Mulvey 1975 suggested that women are often solely used for display rather than for a narrative purpose to increase the predominately male profit margins. Goodwin (1992) argues that female performers are often objectified in music videos through camerawork and editing with body shots to emphasis the sexualised treatment of the star. This suggests that women are used in music videos just for a sexual purpose, suggesting they are not equal to men. Also he also notes that in male artist’s videos there is a similar representation of women where women are used to boost the male star ego.

Another version of the gaze theory is the more complex “female gaze”. The female gaze is used to empower women and is used to describe when women look at men as sex object. Exhibitionism is a term used to the independence of female artist such as Madonna. Allot of research has been written about the representation of women and race. For example in rap music, the explicit Jamaican dance-hall moves show female-body confidence has influenced mainstream performance styles.

All these areas, come together to describe the notion of a “queer gaze” where representation is used to grab the attention of male and female artists to appeal to a homosexual audience.

Moving on to how an artist’s star image is representation; it is all about how an artist is perceived by the audience. Richard Dyer (1979) quoted “A star is an image constructed from a range of materials”. Within pop music, these materials include the songs – as in what they sing about and their musical structures like genres. The image they present in their singles and albums. Another material used to promote their star image is their media coverage; this involves what they say in their interviews about their career and personal life and most significantly their music videos, which helps draw up the image presented in the other material. Artists use each music video to reinforce their existing image. There are certain characteristics used to differentiate the artist from other celebrities in the scene. This is related to iconography which refers to visual features that regularly accompany a performer like Michael Jacksons glove on his left hand.


An artists’ star power refers to how much power they have over their career and it can take different forms. The first is economic power, which gives artists a status that allows them have artistic power, to have creative control over their own image and how they are represented in the media. Furthermore certain artists use their ideological power to influence the public. This can be in the form of their unique fashion trends such as Madonna or attitude towards the audience such as Bono from U2.