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Magazines: Changing Representations

Constructing representations in magazines

  • 3 things to know
  • A2 Unit 3

Overview

How a photograph is mediated before publication, stuart Hall and van Zoonen's argument that gender is constructed through discourse.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

Explain how a photograph is mediated before publication.

Key term

How can a stereotype be used negatively in a magazine?

Key term

Give two reasons why a social group might be under-represented in mainstream magazines.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How do selection and combination construct a representation in a magazine?

    Model answer

    Producers choose which images, words and typefaces to use and then arrange them together, and it is the combination rather than any single element that fixes how the subject is to be understood.

  2. 2

    Explain how a photograph is mediated before publication.

    Model answer

    The subject is styled, posed and lit, one shot is chosen from hundreds, and the image is then cropped and retouched, so what reaches the page has passed through several deliberate interventions.

  3. 3

    Why is retouching a representational issue and not merely a technical one?

    Model answer

    Removing lines, blemishes and body mass presents an unattainable appearance as ordinary, and repeated across a whole market it sets the standard against which readers judge themselves.

  4. 4

    What does Stuart Hall mean by saying that representation produces meaning through language?

    Model answer

    Hall treats language in its broadest sense as any system of signs, and argues that meaning is not contained in the thing itself but produced when signs are used according to shared codes.

  5. 5

    How can a stereotype be used positively in a magazine?

    Model answer

    A magazine addressing a group that mainstream titles ignore can take a familiar type and celebrate it, using instant recognisability to build pride and community rather than to dismiss.

  6. 6

    How can a stereotype be used negatively in a magazine?

    Model answer

    A repeated narrow type restricts what members of that group are shown to be capable of, and readers outside the group take the type as accurate information about people they never meet.

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Contexts of Media
Media Language
Media Representations
Media Industries

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Submarine is set in .
SwanseaCardiffAberystwyth

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AQuantitative data counts how many.
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CA production usually needs both.

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Assemble a full-mark answer from its marking points, in the order an examiner wants them.

An audience receives what is offered.
TrueFalse

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Spot the fault in a statement. The traps are the mistakes students actually make.

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