10 Keywords

1. Male Gaze- term used by Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) to describe what she saw as the male point of view adopted by the camera for the benefit of an assumed male audience. Mulvey viewed the practice of the camera lingering on women’s bodies as evidence that women were being viewed as sex objects for the gratification of men. She argued that the central active characters in the film are male and that the male audience identifies with them in their viewing of the passive females. Women in the audience are also positioned by the narrative to identify with the male gaze and see the world through male eyes. The term Male gaze could be used in my essay because the character of Andy in the film is objectified and there is a camera shot used in the film that pan up and down the protagonist showing that she is being objectified.
   
2. Feminism- Political movement to advance the status of women by challenging values, social constructions and socioeconomic practices which disadvantage women and favour men. The movement emerged from the liberation culture of the 1960s, although individual feminist argued for women’s rights from a much earlier time. Feminism has provided an important perspective for the critique of media products, especially from the standpoint of representation, and has sought to challenge dominant ideologies which reinforce patriarchal values. The Devil Wears Prada includes aspects which disadvantage women and favour men as Andy has to choose from her career or her boyfriend.
   
3. Protagonist- the leading character or hero in a film with whom the audience can identify and from whose point of view the action is positioned often set in binary opposition against the antagonist. The film has Andy as the protagonist whom we being the audience can identify with.
   
4. Binary Oppositions- a term used by Claude Levi-Strauss as part of his argument that narratives are structured around oppositional elements in human culture, for example, good and evil, life and death, night and day, raw and cooked. There is also binary opposition used in the film where Miranda Priestly is in a superior position and Andy is in a inferior position.
   
5. Mise en scène- the arrangement by a film maker of everything that is to be included in a shot or frame. Including props, lighting, actors, characters, poisoning and other technical elements which contribute to the look of the scene and create its distinctive quality and unity. The mise en scène used in the film could be analysed and be linked to the representation of women an example could be that Andy wearing designer clothes show that she needs to look sexy in order to appeal to men.
   
6. Active Audience Theory- any of various theories of audience behaviour that see the audience as active participants in the process of decoding and making sense of media texts. A proportion of the audience would not take the representation as being the reality and would know that the film has been mediated.
   
7. Representation- the process whereby the media construct versions of people, places and events in images, words or sound for transmission though media texts to an audience. Representations provide models of how we see gender, social groups, individuals and aspects of the world we all inhabit. They are ideological in that they are constructed within a framework of values and beliefs. Representations are therefore mediated and reflect the value systems of their sources. No representation is ever real, only a version of the real. I will be discussing the representation of women in the film, how it has changed throughout the years and how it links to the modern society.
   
8. Stereotype- the social classification of a group of people by identifying common characteristics and universally applying them in an often oversimplified and generalised way, such that the classification represents value judgements and assumptions about the group concerned. The stereotype of women should be concentrating of their family life rather than their career is reinforced in the film.
   
9. Hypodermic Needle Theory- early attempt in the 1930s and 1940s to explain the effects media texts have on audiences. Based on the assumed ‘passive’ nature of a mass audience, the theory argues that consumption of media texts is like the injection of a drug and that the audiences’ behaviour and opinions are therefore directly affected. Another proportion of the audience inject what they are seeing in the film and take it to be the reality not thinking that the film has been mediated.
   
10. Narrative Theory- a type of thinking that seeks to explain narrative structures and their relationship to wider cultural and genre-related factors. I will be looking at this because I will be including the different narrative theories.

Defining Representation

Definition: Representation is the mediated versions of people, in this case woman, in the form of a re-presentation.

Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures.
The term refers to the processes involved as well as to its products. For instance, in relation to the key markers of identity - Class, Age, Gender and Ethnicity (the 'cage' of identity) - representation involves not only how identities are represented (or rather constructed) within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to such demographic factors. Consider, for instance, the issue of 'the gaze'. How do men look at images of women, women at men, men at men and women at women?

Feminism

Feminism is the response to society’s assumptions that women should be subservient to men. Until the emergence of feminism, women were treated almost as objects, passive agents in the male world (PATRIACHAL WORLD)