Interpreting, Understanding and Applying an Academic Text

Being Discovered: The emergence of female address on MTV.

Lisa A. Lewis

Since MTV's inception in 1981, the issue of sexism has been a recurring and insistent theme in both popular and academic criticism. But the charge of sexism, while it importantly foregrounds issues of textual politics, too frequently treats MTV as a monolithic textual system, and sexism as a static and ahistorical mode of representation written into media textuality. Music video does bring together two cultural forms that have notorious histories as promulgators of female objectification - rock music and televisual imagery. And specific textual examples of women in chains, caged boxes and strewn across sets in skimpy leather outfits can certainly be called upon to justify such claims. But focusing exclusively on the sexist representations present in many male-addressed videos overshadows the emergence on MTV of an aggregate of videos produced to songs sung by female musicians, and their enormous popularity among female fans.

MTV's role in the rise of female musicianship

In the years leading up to the start of music video promotion, female rock musicians were struggling for recognition both as vocalist( the traditional female niche) and as instrumentalists and composers. The contemporary women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s provided momentum for change, as did the early punk movement in Britain at the end of the 1970s. Although punk emerged essentially as a working-class male subculture, Hebdige (1983) makes the point that punk included a minority of female participants who aggressively tried to carve out a specifically female form of expression, a sharp contrast to the usual subsuming of women by subcultural phallocentricism. 

Punk propelled girls onto the stage and once there, as musicians and singers, they systematically transgressed the codes governing female performance... These performers have opened up a new space for women as active participators in the production of popular music. (Hebdige 1983: 83-5)

In our group, we broke down this academic text, finding out words and phrases that we weren't familiar with, then we used google to define them for us. This then helped us to understand the text more.

Inception- The first part/beginning of a series of other things.

Monolithic- Massive or imposing in size.

Static- Unchanging.

Ahistorical- Unrelated to history.

Textuality- The attitudes that distinguish the text.

Promulgators- A public statement containing information.

Aggregate- Sum up the whole amount.