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Engaging with Media Images: Exploring Spectatorship in Visual Media

Dive into the realm of media images, exploring how they shape our perceptions and affect us. Learn about key concepts, methodologies, and critical visual analysis to inform your thesis on spectatorship and corporeality in the media. Join us on this thought-provoking journey!

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Engaging with Media Images: Exploring Spectatorship in Visual Media

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  1. Get a Grip:Studying Spectatorship of Auviovisual Media Cinema Studies, Stockholm University 22 January – 29 March 2010 Katariina Kyrölä katariina.kyrola@mail.film.su.se

  2. 1) Introduction to the theme and emphasis of the course 2) Questions and choices (methodology, material, concepts, frameworks) to consider when you begin to plan and write your thesis 3) A narrative of how I made these choices during the process of writing my doctoral dissertation

  3. Gripping Media Images • ”getting a grip” – looking from a distance, but presuming proximity • ”what grips us” – what images or viewing experiences stay with us, what we may refuse and why: factors in the media image, the viewer, the viewing situation • Questions of spectatorship & corporeality

  4. Media images have power to: • Introduce things otherwise unknown and even unimaginable to us • Make some of those things even mundane • Give names and forms to fears and desires • Make mundane issues strange • Participate in producing our very sense of what is unusual/unimaginable and usual/mundane

  5. Choices to make in preparing for thesis • Method: ”tools” of analysis, e.g. audienceethnography, psychoanalyticalclosereading –> doesnottellmuch of what is doneyet • Methodology: the widerpackage of tools and theoretical, conceptual and politicalcommitmentsthatcomewithmethods (Saukko 2003) • Methodnotsomething to beinsertedbetween the researcher and the material –> the toolscanchangeyourway of looking, changeyourmaterial and changethemselves

  6. Concepts • Mieke Bal (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (incl. image, misc-en-scène, framing, intention, critical intimacy) • Allowing space for redefinitions or specifications of concepts • On this course: fantasy, gender, ”real”, affect, memory, the body, sensoriality, audience, intertextuality, discourse

  7. Research material or ”object” • Important but NOT determining in choosing, using and adapting concepts and methodologies • A specific media product? A genre? A recurring figure, structure or tendency in the media? Representations of a social group? • A question? A suggestion? A claim? • A group/person(s) whose ways of looking interest you?

  8. Situating and locating • Why the issueorquestionthatinterestsyoumayinterestothers, too (relevance of the topic) • Yourresearchmaterialor ”object” (whatothershavesaidaboutit) • Yourconcepts and methodology (conceptscanfunction as methodologies) • Yourways of looking (whatmakesyou look the wayyoudo)

  9. Critical visual methodology (Rose 2007) • Look at the media images’ ownvisualeffects • Thinkaboutways of seeingmobilizedbyimages • How the effect and ways of seeingproduceorunravel social differences and hierarchies • Whatare the social and intertextualcontexts of viewing • Whatexpectations, meanings and historiesspectatorsbring to theirviewing

  10. EXAMPLE OF CONCEPT CHOICES:Doctoral dissertation Katariina KyröläThe Weight of ImagesAffective Engagements with Fat Corporeality in the Media

  11. The firstextensivestudy on howfatgenderedbodiesarerepresented in the contemporary media • An exploration on the methodology of how to study the relationsbetween media images and viewingbodies as corporeal, affectiveengagements • Background: feministtheory on embodiment, feminist media studies, culturalstudies

  12. Affect • ”affective engagements”  Media images of fat bodies may engage viewers affectively, cannot be rationalized or criticized ”away”  ”affect” as both intensities and flows and hierarchical forms and structures

  13. Body image • A way to grasp ”invisible” but still gendered and corporeal relations and effects between viewing bodies and media images • Used not in the sense of negativity/positivity or congruence/distortion between body and self-image  instead, refers to corporeal ability to open to change and multiplicity

  14. Research material • Media image material: fatness in newspaper and magazine articles, television series, documentaries, feature films, websites • Accounts of viewing experiences: the strategic "I", culturally & personally located, combining the ontological and the epistemological

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