REPRESENTATION research
As my chosen genre is alternative, being quite a broad genre, this comes with much creative freedom, We plan to create a video that challenges some of the more stereotypical conventions of the genre. After gaining more knowledge through the genre and narrative research section, we have reached the conclusions considering the representation in the genre, some of these representations are shown below:
Gender
Ethnicity
Age
Sexuality
Gender ideals within the alternative indie genre are somewhat equal, although there still seems to be more of a male focus, but i believe this comes with all genre, genre is represented in a more subtle appropriate way with rarely any sort of sexualisation like found in the pop industry, gender is shown to be a fluid thing rather then boy and girl, this ties in with sexuality representation, as alternative genre has the room to explore these differences in people rather then focus of the solid ones.
Ethnicity is also well represented within the genre, being much more covered, although this does depend on the type of video the band/artist design as high budget productions tend to have more cast where as smaller budgets tend stick to just the band as the cast mainly.
Age is an area of alternative music that whilst well varied is heavily focused on ages 18 to about 25, although there are bands/artist which are much older then this and do feature in their videos, but usually when an older cast member is brought into a younger artists music video it is purely for the fact they are old not as a character. The reason for this young age representation is alternative/indie music genre is rather new to the music industry in comparison to classical or pop music. Therefore it is more likely to be younger people producing the music.
The last way representation is shown within the genre is Sexuality, this like gender tends to be widely explored in the genre and shows mass fluidity, with sexual experimentation touched upon in most videos, and LGBTQ+ views explored. This is the representation me and my partner are going to focus on the most as this is a community we are both part of and therefore are passionate about.
Definition - Reconstruction of aspects of reality in a media text refers to how media does not offer a window to world but represents a viewpoint
Main Theorists: Marx, Althusser, Ideologies, Male Gaze, Stereotypes
Marx 1932 - Proposed economic base/superstructure model of society and culture and how the idea of this base refers to means of production.
This is then followed by the superstructure which is formed on top of the base and comprises society and cultures ideologies as well as a legal system, political system and religion.
an example of this is how the LGBTQ+ Community (the sexuality representation we have chosen) makes it difficult to represent them as it is ever changing and developing sexuality. therefore we will try our best to represent the most accurate of our ability the community.
Althusser - State Apparatus
Althusser is a French Marxist theorist who believed every society is made up of a repressive state apparatus (Education, Family, Religion Population and Culture) and the police, law, government and army use physical control to control this.
In today's society, unfortunately, the ideology of heterosexuality is still a dominant one, therefore we will be subverting this in our video by representing homosexuality as a dominant ideology within our work.
