1. Femininity
Gender in Pop Music

2. Katy Perry
Analyse the key signifiers in the two imagers in front of you.
Question: What messages about femininity and gender does this performer embody?

3. Male Gaze
Laura Mulvey believes that women are placed in the media to be looked at.
She calls this the gaze.
This can be both:
Voyeuristic The notion of looking and gaining pleasure from seeing these beautiful objects
Fetishistic A more highly sexualised desire to have something, women are placed as objects of desire.
Therefore The Gaze can is voyeuristic and fetishistic turning women into a fetish (object) that is beautiful and celebrated for her looks but considered as an object.

4. Katy Perry
How can we apply Mulveys ideas to a study of women in music video?
As you watch the following video make a note of how the audience is positioned as either male or female. And how we are encouraged to look both voyeuristically and fetishistically.
Does the gaze shift sides in parts? Why is this interesting? Do we have a female gaze emerging?

5. Dominant Ideology
In what ways does this Music Video conform to dominant ideology?

6. Gender as a Construct - Butler
Judith Butler says gender is a role we play and we choose to conform or resist.
She says there are some set rules that are constructed through the media but we can choose to actively resist these.
Can you think of any celebrity or musician that actively resists the dominant ideological perspective on gender.

7. Lady GaGa

8. Alejandro
In this video she chooses to subvert traditional gender stereotypes. Men are shown to be confused with their masculinity in modern times and women to be more dominant.
We see: the trapped, confused male
Trapped in traditional masculine roles: guard, policeman
On strings: a patriarchal puppet?
Wearing fishnet tights & stillettos; androgyny

9. Men dominated by Gaga
She possesses the phallus
Reverses sexual positioning
Alejandro

10.

• Enslaved men, a workforce/soldiers/ sexualised/homo-erotic
• 11. No identity, uniform - all the same
• 12. Signifies their entrapment at stereotypes of masculinity: physical power/strength/heroism

Alejandro

13. Lady GaGa & Femininity
How does GaGa present modern femininity?
Does she conform or resist dominant ideology? Why in each case?