Women
Look is a magazine for women by women about women. There are very few representations of men in an edition and the representation of women is far from simplistic.
As with every other element of this text - it may not seem to be incredibly challenging to the consumer but that doesn't mean that it's a simple text to study.
We are used to analysing the representations of various groups within a text and making decisions as to whether that group has been portrayed in a negative or positive way; assessing whether a stereotyped version of that group has been used or promoted. But how often do we consider how the audience is represented by a text? After all, each and every text will make assumptions about its target audience.
Look is no different - read these passages from an article about Gender and magazines...
You will have found from studying the magazine that Look has some very specific ways of representing young women inside its pages, occasionally stereotyping women into recognisable groups.
Sometimes these representations are positive and reflect aspirational role-models that the target audience can see use. Other times these representations are 2-dimensional and hark back to a very traditional and old fashioned.
This contradictory nature of magazines shouldn't really come as any surprise to us. Magazines such as Look target a Mass Audience, a consequence of trying to reach so many different types of people is that you are bound to send out a certain amount of conflicting ideologies. You can look at this in two ways - either a pluralistic acceptance that women are diverse, or a cynical ploy to capture as big an audience as possible.
That argument will be up to you to decide on - but one thing that can't be denied is the cynical representation of the audience in their approach to engaging audience with a number of articles showing them that they should have better clothes, more expensive make-up, more shiny hair and a dozen other improvements to make them look and feel like the celebrities that are splashed all over the pages. Then in an act of blatant manipulation, the solutions to all of these problems magically appear from nowhere. Except it's not magic is it? These solutions are on glossy adverts for the shops on our high streets that we walk past every day or are a click away from our Facebook profiles!
Whilst it may seem naive to think that advertisers or magazine encoders themselves would not exploit the subject matter of their content in a bid to make some money from the audience, it does set up a moral chicken and egg situation.
Do the adverts reflect the concerns of the audience and the articles in the magazine?
...or...
Do the articles in the magazine and concerns of the audience exist purely because of the paying advertisers?
Arguments about representations often surround the notion of Hegemony and who is controlling what an why. This is no different - it is just perhaps a little more insidious than just representing women in a series of easy to recognise stereotypes. That's not to say they haven't...
A decent analysis will stay away from simply deciding whether or not a representation is positive or negative. It is actually a lot more complex.
Take the recent stories relating to pop-star Rihanna and her relationship with rapper Chris Brown.
The magazine has spent years constructing Rihanna as exactly the kind of woman that they want the audience to aspire to. Someone successful, popular - who has a strong independence and identity. A woman who does her own thing but within the realms of the mainstream.
After her public split from Chris Brown she became much more of a symbol - having been a victim of domestic violence but not acting like a victim she represented so many of the positive and progressive ideologies surrounding women that a magazine such as Look would be keen to promote.
The problem for Look magazine is that they cannot ignore stories that show Rihanna back with the man who publicly tried to humiliate and degrade her, and was violent against her. The dominant ideology of our society is that violence in a relationship is wrong and in many cases unforgivable. Rihanna's actions cause a problem for the magazine.
Do they stick with their ideological message about how women should act? This would mean attacking Rihanna's actions and suggesting that she is in the wrong.
Do they continue to support Rihanna - even if that is giving her the coverage and attention that it usually does? This could be seen as the 'safe' option - although it obviously sends out mixed messages to the audience.
In the end the magazine decided to run with an article that suggested Rihanna's decision has sprung from some kind of mental illness, a dependency on her former boyfriend based on her own troubled childhood.
Whether any of this is true or not is unprovable from reading the magazine and really it's immaterial. The magazine has carefully sidestepped having an opinion of its own - leaving the representation of what women should do in such situation as ambiguous.
What is clear, however is a recurring representation in this magazine, namely that women can be strong, powerful, successful and independent - yet they will always be slaves to their emotions and ruled by relationships. That they often make bad decisions when it comes to affairs of the heart and that their weakness is often psychological.
You don't have to look too far to find this representation. Look at any front cover.
Celebrity
Whilst the magazine and its website are desperate to show us what we should be dressed in and exactly where to buy it - the celebrities are often the people who encourage us the reasons why we should buy it - even if that is just by wearing the clothes.
But the relationship between Celebrity - Audience - Magazine is a bit more complicated than that isn't it?
The celebrities have a Symbiotic relationship with Look magazine and the Audience - all three need each other it seems - you can also look at the appeals of celebrity as the appeals of the magazine.
But it is important to analyse each use of celebrity - even the same person can be used in different ways by the magazine; one minute they are the untouchable, luminous artist with a sense of otherness that we could only dream of having - living a lifestyle that is beyond our aspirations...
...and at other times the exact same person is 'papped' leaving a gym in sweat pants trying to shed their christmas weight - they are one of us, with the same anxieties, hang ups and preoccupations as us.
Same person only the context has changed. And that's the thing we have to always remember about celebrities - the context is always changing. This is because celebrities are a construction of the media...
...well almost.
The problem is that they are also real people - so when real things happen to them it can make matters very confusing.
Read the questions on this slide and then watch the video below from Charlie Brooker's excellent Newswipe...
Whilst there are a number of different ways this insightful sequence reminds us exactly how representation should be seen as a construction - there are so many contradictory representations that remind us of Mediation being all about Selection, Construction and Focus...
...but this also highlights another appeal of celebrity for the audience and a key use of celebrity for the media and that's the media's ability to tell us stories.
Narrative is a key appeal of many types of media and its use when constructing celebrities is a particularly clever way to keep us consuming.
Just some of the narrative theory we've looked at the past can be applied to a celebrity such as, but not exclusively, Jade Goody.
- Character arcs
- Narrative structure
- Enigma Codes
- Archetypes
- Twists
The lives of others make great stories, and if they don't they can always be made to make great stories - the added bonus when it comes to celebrities over characters in a film or TV drama is that a celebrity is 'Real' - whatever that means?
So finally, here is a plan for an answer about representation - you must make sure that you scrutinise the magazine and make notes on the representations of Ethnicity, Age and Nationality - but remember at all times that Representation is a construction and if seen as such you will guarantee a decent answer...
