CI
A collective identity is the shared sense of belonging to a group. The collective identities are also genders like women. Women are a collective that have suffered a lot through media representation like how they are represented in films, adverts and also in music videos that represent this group like objects with no intelligence and sometimes as servers for a man. Before people behaviours were to reinforce their masculinity or femininity these now have disappeared and as Stryker says every gender is negotiable, also feminism has helped to change this.
In the past people were used to seeing women as inferior to men. That is what Laura Mulvey described as the famous male gaze that consist on the the perspective of a straight man which leads to the objectification of women and the consideration of men as superior. It is represented in some adverts in the past like one of Kellogs peps of 1938 that says “so the harder a wife works the cuter she looks” and another one that have written “show her its a mans world” about van heusen ties 1950s .The adverts were accepted by the society and it could be argued that the kids do the same as treating women as servers because in the effects theory of Bandura (the bobo doll) it proved that children do what their parents or examples do when they see them doing it on a video. In these adverts we could also see the cultural hegemony mention by Gramsci that means the dominance of a group over another which is not mentioned by Gramsci in terms of media but could be applied to it.
Another example of the male gaze is the movie “The Man with the Golden Gun” that also fails the Bechdel Test because the girls rarely speak with each other and when they are speaking to women they are talking about a man. We can see there is an exception with two japanese girls that fight with some men but that is more for the race than for gender but on the other hand we have the rest of the girls that have unnecessary nudity scenes and they are represented as objects with no intelligence. We could see that when britt Ekland is used as a sexual attractive object to seduce the bad guys. And we could also see that all the women in the movie are attracted to James Bond. We could also see but that type of movies that the target audience were men and the dominant image in the cinema industry were men .
Thanks to feminism, the movement that seeks to gain political and social rights we have made a big jump in terms of gender equality in media ,also thanks to the new technologies that as david gauntlett present they are they are changing the concept of collective identity by the arrival of the prosumer because people could upload and let other people see their opinion and identify with them. We could see that the adverts have now changed and there is a feminist advertising campaign called this girl can that makes adverts of different women of all the types of body, ethnicities and interest , playing sports and doing things that are traditionally related with men. Because there is still a big gap in the sports world ,less women practice professional sports and with these campaign, they are trying to make other women think that they could do everything a man could do . also Angela McRobbie speak about a big shift in women media representation because they have passed from being passive and objectified to being independent and autonomous.
Cinema has also changed with feminism and new types of movies and tv shows have appeared, also woman could work “easily” in the movie industry these have changed the whole representation of women one example of these is american psycho that was directed by a woman this film is a indie film which in contrast with , Another example of this transition is Wonder Woman which tent to be more mainstream movie and we could say we have women only working on the extremes . Wonder woman which has broken all the stereotypes and has demonstrated the theory of Judith Butler that says that gender is an spectrum and the traditional notions of masculinity and femininity are artificial. It has made these by using propp’s character theory and introducing strong woman that fight and introducing a change in roles making the man as he was “the princess” (Steve Trevor) and the woman as a hero (Wonder Woman) these little changes could lead one day in to total equality with a movies of woman heros and of men heros as a 50/50.
The advances in technology have helped a lot to reach the equality we have now for example the social networks have introduced new movements like the hashtag me too and times up which their main aim is to stop sexism ,Gauntlett argues that technology has led to an implosion of identity, as audiences become more keen to identify as unique individuals, than a homogenous collective.With that we could see the new figure of the media prosumer which produces and consumes media this is mainly on social networks like youtube.
In my opinion these little changes will lead to a big change that will make us have a bigger understanding of gender and let us see that there is no difference between both of them it will also let the people see that gender is not specific nad it could be a mixture of both with the representation of non binary genders in movies and in the movie industry .Also thanks to the new technology we would see a more notable change because the figure of prosumers let the people represent themselves as individuals this people will influence and concern people that sexism have to disappear.