Representation

What is representation?

There are two meanings for representation. First, when people become representations of their demographic. In other words, their gender, race, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability and disability. Second, how people are represented, the ideology of it.

Representation refers to the ways in which character, situation, sounds and images show the different aspects of the worlds. This can also be seen as, how someone or something is portrayed or represented. Representation is never neutral, but it is always biased. Lastly, there is always a particular reason as to why someone is getting represented.

What is Ideology?

Ideologies are rules that help given behaviour, norms and values. This system is embedded into different cultures through schools, politics, mass and social media. These ideologies are created over a long period of time and are set by those in power. Overall, ideology means a commonly held set of beliefs and ideals.

There are two different types of ideologies, they both exist at the same time. Except one is dominant.

The Dominant Ideology is a set of beliefs that are held by the majority of the population. Whereas, the alternative ideology has many different ideas from different viewpoints.

These ideologies are usually seen as immediate ‘Wrongs’, but over the time they can become the new dominant ideology.

Sex and Gender

Gender is a cultural construct; however, gender and sex are used interchangeably but there is an important difference.

Sex refers to the biological difference between males and females. On the other hand, gender refers to the social and cultural differences between women and men. This comes under the roles and responsibilities concerning the ways in which men and women should act.

Your sex is given to you from your DNA which consists of your XX or XY chromosomes. But the gender depends on the way we act and is learned through different cultures. This concludes that sex is fixed (not always the case as sex changing procedures can be done) while gender is fluid.

Since we are little we are drilled with certain ideas, almost telling us that girls and boys have to be a certain way. For example, as little kids your parents must have bought you kitchen sets if you were a girl. Guns (toys), football which are more physical games for boys. Concluding that women should be doing home stuff like cleaning, looking after children and cooking. Whereas men should be stronger headed and dominant.

What is Objectification?

Objectification is the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object. Before women were always objectified in all movie covers, for example ‘King Kong’, ‘Invasion of the Saucer – Men’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Jaws’ and many more

Even in old posters, we can see how they are trying to force us into thinking how men and women’s roles should be. For example, this first poster shows a very exposed women looking at a shoe, however if you connote this poster you see that its simply saying that women should be at men’s shoes. This denotes that they should always listen to what men say, and oblige their every need.

But have things changed?

Given Donald Trump, the president of united states. He is very racist and sexist as he says ‘it really doesn’t matter what they write, as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass’, ‘You never get to the face because the body’s so good’ this is literally women being objectified, ‘ A person who is very flat chested is very hard to be a 10’ this suggests that he thinks that there should be a certain way women should look to be a 10/10. ‘ I tell my friends to “be rougher” with their wives’ again shows how he thinks that women should be subjected, and lastly, ‘ Women, you have to treat them like shit’.

The Headless Women of Hollywood

Everyone has seen one of those movie posters which only show a women’s body, but not her face. For example, ‘Youth’ and ‘Hall Pass’. As you can see, women are headless in these posters however we get to see the male characters face.

Why are these types of images so prevalent in our media industries?

It’s because media is a way of communication, it communicates messages about how we should act, what we should buy and what we should look like.  In a way it maintains males authority by using different messages to indicate that for instance, the headless women which shows male authority.

The biggest challenge faced by male authority is shown through the way women pose, this authority is shown when women are shown as objects to keep them subjugated. The way they do that is by telling women that their only value lies in the way they look.