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NAUGHTY GIRLS AND RED BLOODED WOMEN Representations of female heterosexuality in music video

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14680770500058207

1471-5902

Diane Railton, Paul Watson,

Music History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. It is worth stressing at this point that this article is about the ways in which women are variously figured in and through forms of visual culture. As such, while on the one hand we do not wish to ignore the complexities of cultural identity and identification (Aguilera, for example, is of Irish and Ecuadorian descent and now publicly identifies herself as Latina), on the other hand what we discuss here are the cultural tropes of raced identity (the ways in which distinct categories of white and black structure ways of being human and ways of being a woman) that are constructed and contrasted through forms of representation. 2. The white women we discuss here, of course, are middle-class women. Indeed, representations of white working-class women differ significantly from those of middle-class women. For discussion of representations of working-class white women, see McClintock () and Weitz (). 3. Think, for example, of the "untouchability" of singer Julie London in the 1956 film The Girl Can't Help It where she appears only as a vision haunting the male lead. 4. The comparison between the visual representation of the singers is particularly revealing given that the sentiments of the songs are practically identical. The lyrics of both deal with sexual obsession and fantasy, Minogue's "I Can't Get You Out of My Head/Boy Your Loving is All I Think About" matched by Knowles' "I Think About You All the Time/I See You in My Dreams." Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul Watson Paul Watson is a senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Teesside. His research interests are focused around cinema and has published work about gender, politics, and representation. E-mail: p.watson@tees.qc.uk Diane Railton is a senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Teesside. Her research interests are focused on contemporary popular culture. She has published work about gender and popular music. E-mail: d.railton@tees.ac.uk Paul Watson is a senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Teesside. His research interests are focused around cinema and has published work about gender, politics, and representation. E-mail: p.watson@tees.qc.uk