After Gill's article "Postfeminist Media Culture" I have a reactionary horror towards media. Media is constructed with regulating women in a multitude of ways: sexually, psychologically, etc. through tools such as irony and anti-feminist indoctrination. There is no resolution of differences or finding a common ground in this mediating. (more irony!)
However in "Feminist Perspectives on the Media" van Zoonen proposes that media is "among central sites where struggle over meaning takes place" (34). So does media offer a safe place to watch and theorize solutions to "real life" situations; a place where women can sit back and objectively analyze possible actions and outcomes in their own lives? This concept places media as a more positive role model. I derive further comfort in van Zoonen's description of encoding/decoding as attributed to Hall (34).
While factions inside the media industry have its own agenda, political, economical, through which they encode symbols, the audience also has its own lens to decipher or decode the message. There may not be endless possible interpretations, but there are differing messages then what the producers and distributors intended. I am unsure whether this is a conscious or unconscious attempt to circumvent prescribed female roles.
So how is media mediating girl identity? In an analysis of animated children's films, I see a change from a generation or two ago. The film Brave portrays a princess, of course a princess we haven't escaped that, in a complete family unit whereas Cinderella, Snow White, Little Mermaid, or Beauty and the Beast have fractured families. The heroine Merida works out a relationship with her mother where both compromise their expectations. The zoom out scene includes Merida saying, and I paraphrase, destiny is inside you if you are brave enough to seize it. She is riding on her own horse; her mother riding beside her. There is no prince in sight.
There is a change here from tradition. The princess does not need a prince to make her dreams come true. This could be said to be empowering. Is it a better reality? I think of Brudsen's quote in van Zoonen's article, 'arguing for more realistic images is always an argument for the representation or "your" version of reality' (32).
PS The male roles in Brave were undeveloped and uncouth--how unfortunate!
I haven't seen Brave but it sounds interesting. Definitely a shift from the scripted fairytale that says a princess must have a handsome prince to rescue her. I noticed in the new Snow White tale (Snow White and the Huntsman) that Snow White's role shifted from this needing to be rescued by a handsome prince portrayal to a woman who fought alongside a huntsman in defense of her kingdom. Although Snow White fights for her kingdom in this version—her character still ascribes to an old sexualized feminine ideal of the young, pure, virginal princess. At least she wasn’t rescued this time by a prince—she was saved by a poor huntsman—which seems to do more justice to the male portrayal (although he is still very masculine and handsome) in film than the female portrayal.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you and Brunsen in van Zoonen’s article—the argument for more realistic portrayals is almost always an argument for more portrayals of “your” version of reality.
I too haven't seen Brave or (Snow White and the Huntsman) but I want to see both. I think the most interesting, and certainly negotiated, rendering of Snow White I've read in a while is Francesca Lia Block's "Snow." Snow White literally grows up in a controlled enviornment with seven brother/father figures. I won't ruin it, but its unexpected for a contemporary retelling of a highly gendered fairy tale. But the genre, the fairy tale that is, is the birthplace of gendered representations that we still see alive and well today. I find it hard to believe the handsome huntsman or prince can't be written out altogether simply because he is a dying vestige of the original fairytale. He still serves a function in the representation of femininity even in 2012.
ReplyDeleteBria-
DeleteI love Snow! We taught it in the last girlhood class - that had more of a literature bent to it - and I think it is awesome. Go see Snow White and the Huntsman too. What I found interesting is how much sympathy/empathy I had for the Wicked Queen. It's interesting that they recast her a bit (though my reading could be based more on the superiority of Charlize Theron's acting over Kristen Stewart's than the actual plot).
I love when van Zoonen talks about ways "women can use media to pick up and try out different feminine subject positions at the level of fantasy" (p. 36). This talk of a sort of "identity play" is central to the work of lots of new media scholars (Turkle, Bolter and Grusin, Gee, etc) but play isn't always uncomplicated. How do we make distinctions between what we "can be" and what we "ought to be." The notion of play is appealing - and I think there's truth in it - but to understand the options media gives us I think we have to be taught to see them as options and not "ways one must be."
ReplyDeleteI took my 4 year old to see Brave last week. It was nice and educating not to have happiness be contingent on being saved by a prince. But, why did they feel the need to portray Merida with so many "male" qualities, and develop the movie around them? Same principle with the Princess and the Frog. Tiana was not a princess, but later became one; her "male" characteristics were also highlighted in the movie.
ReplyDeleteYolonda,
ReplyDeleteI also was going to bring up The Princess and the Frog, but as an example of a female character who is driven and goal-oriented. I am not sure we can say, especially after the readings we have done, that these are strictly 'male' qualities. Although I do agree that she is shown to value her father's characteristics over her mother's, however this may because she is mourning his loss.
Also, the movie also includes an inept prince who learns a lot about how to be a less-selfish person (frog) through his interactions with a woman.