Gauntlett: Chapter Two- Some Background debates

-Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and many others returned to Germany. “Their apathy towards the mass media will likely have been increased by the observation that Hitler had apparently been able to use the media organisations as a tool for widespread propaganda”.
(pg20)
-Adorno suggests many teen rebellions, are just any normal consumers.

-“…Fiske says there us an ‘overspill’ of meanings (ibid.:70), so that most texts contain the ‘preferred’ meaning - the one intended by its producers – but also offer possibilities for consumers to create their own alternative or resistant readings. Indeed, Fiske says that people are not merely consumers of texts – the audience rejects this role ‘and becomes a producer, a producer of meanings and pleasures’ (1989c: 59)”.
(pg24)

-Fiske says that Modonna is:
“contains the patriarchal meanings of feminine sexuality, and the resisting ones that her sexuality is hers to use as she wishes in ways that do not require masculine approval.” (1989a: 124)
(pg25)

-“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantansy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitions role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-lookes-at-ness.”
From- Laura Mulveys article ‘Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema’ in 1975 (reproduced in Hollows et al., 2000)
(Pg 38)

-‘The female character has no importance in a film, Mulvey says, except as a ‘spectacle’, the erotic object of both male charcters and the cinema spectators; her role is to drive the hero to act the way he does”(Page 38)

-“Male viewers identify with the (male) protagonist, and the female characters are the subject of their desiring gaze. Female viewers, Mulvey says, are also compelled to take the viewpoint of the central (male) character, so that women are denied a viewpoint of their own and instead participate in the pleasure of men looking at women”. (pg38)

-‘Men looking at women; women watch themselves being looked at’, as John Berger had put it (1972: 47).
Berger, John (1972) Ways of seeing, London: Penguin

-“…female characters are passive erotic objects”. Pg39

-Mulveys argument denies heterosexual female gaze altogether. The audience – male and female is positioned so that they admire the male lead for his actions and adopt his romantic/erotic view of women.