Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- 4 Music Video in Black and White: Race and Femininity
- 5 That Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity
- 6 Masculinity and the Absent Presence of the Male Body
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Music Video in Black and White: Race and Femininity
from PART 2 - SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- 4 Music Video in Black and White: Race and Femininity
- 5 That Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity
- 6 Masculinity and the Absent Presence of the Male Body
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
So far in this book we have been concerned, first, with exploring the current position of music video in both cultural and critical discourse, a story in which its sheer visibility in the former context finds curious reflection through its near invisibility in the latter. Second, we have sketched a broadly feminist and broadly poststructuralist conceptual framework for pursuing the analysis of music video, one that is attentive to its formal and aesthetic characteristics on the one hand, but also sensitive to its specific function and place within the sphere of popular culture on the other. This is the dilemma that emerges from the reading of music video which locates it as being exemplary of postmodern and postfeminist culture but as irreducible to either postmodern or postfeminist politics. Then, third, in offering a blueprint for a critical vocabulary capable of addressing this dilemma we have indicated some of the ways in which notions of genre and authorship work very differently in relation to music video compared to other forms of culture, and how, in turn, these ideas bear in important ways on how we can understand the pleasures and politics of music videos. We have not yet, however, been directly concerned with the ways in which music video, or rather individual music videos, seek to construct specific cultural identities more or less precisely and more or less coherently.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Music Video and the Politics of Representation , pp. 87 - 107Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011