Representation

Meghan Trainor

Stuart Hall is a cultural Theorist that looked at the role of the audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts into different social groups. He had then created a model suggesting three ways in which a media text can be decoded.

For example the three types of ways the text can be decoded are

Dominant reading: This is when the reader or decoder of the text accepts the preferred reading the way the director/writer had intended them to.

Negotiated reading: This is when the reader or decoder understands the text but doesn't fully agree with the preferred reading.

Oppositional reading: This is when the reader doesn't agree with the preferred reading and has opposing views of the text being presented to them.

For example Stuart Hall's theory is evident in Meghan Trainors 'All about that bass'



Dominant reading: The music video portrays Meghan Trainor signing about how people who are overweight are accepted and how they are beautiful in every way, which helps promote her image and representation, she is denoted throughout the video to be wearing a lot bright colour clothing that is stereo-typically linked to a bakery lady, which over connotes that she is happy about people being fat and they still considered attractive to men, mainly most of her dedicated fans would defend her and would feel sympathetic to her.

Negotiated reading: The audience understand that Meghan Trainor is trying to project her image and her thought about overweight people but however the way she projects and says the lyrics about the topic as its fairly passive aggressive isn't the best way to depict the subject.


Oppositional reading: Meghan Trainor is projecting passive aggressive words and criticizing Skinny Women, making her whole point of larger women being attractive and keeping a civilised and respectful debate becomes hostile and fairly negative in its own right as 'Overweight women isn't a bad thing but projects the underweight women isn't a good thing making her point fairly negative.

Theorist Laura Mulvey came up with a theory called the 'Male Gaze' which suggests that audiences view female characters through the eyes of a Heterosexual male. Which is seen in many mainstream music videos to help attract predominant male audiences by having women be sexualised as objects promoting their image and idenity, music videos such as Blurred lines  and Miley Cirus with wrecking ball which projects women in this way.

For my music video I would go against having women being treated as objects if I had any female roles as I don't want to conform to stereotypes in all cases and for the Stuart Halls reading There would be many different meanings making it polysemic in the world of the diegesis but also there is readings that I don't want the audience to have as it wasn't intended in that way.