RESEARCH: Laura Mulveys

Laura Mulvey didn’t write her theory directly about music videos, she wrote about representation of women in the media in general, but this can be applied to music videos.

In her quote she basically states that men have power and women don’t. That men do the looking and women are the ones that get looked at. Also that the perception that men have of women (that women are sexual objects) is in printed on images of women in the media. Mulvey also discusses that women are ‘dismembered.’ We as an audience are made to focus on certain parts of their body and not the women as a whole whereas the men are shown as a whole.

 In this video there are a lot of close-ups of their bums, which makes the audience focus on those parts of their body. This goes along with Mulvey’s theory that women are looked on as sexual objects. For this video I think that the audience would more likely be men because of the content in the video.

In this video it is clear that men do the looking and women get looked at, which is something that Laura Mulvey mentioned in her theory. These screenshots show the men’s reactions after they look at the women in the video. Firstly the reaction of the male character when he looks at Nicki Minaj shows that he’s impressed with what he sees. Another example is the last two pictures and the reaction on the male faces after they look at Cassie, this shows that they can’t take their eyes of off her and are ‘love struck.’