Adele and Adam Lambert

Figure 1: Adele 21 album cover (Unknown, n.d.)

Adele:

Adele is a popular female singer, and is well known for her emotional ballads. She has quite a feminine personality and dresses as such. She does not have the ‘typical female body type’, however is quite iconic as a strong, powerful woman.

On this album cover, Adele is touching her hair and face, making her appear feminine but not in a sexualised way. Her eyes are closed and so there is no connection between the audience and artist, meaning Adele is not asserting influence or power over the audience. The black and white filter of the image gives a simple, old-fashioned feel to the image, while the soft lighting is traditionally used on females in movies (particularly in the mid-20th century) to make them look beautiful and appealing, particularly to males. An example is shown below.

Figure 2: Female shown with soft lighting (Unknown, 2015)

Figure 3: Male on Adele's album cover (Josh Barrowclough, 2016)

Our version of Adele:

The subject is touching his face in a highly femininsed pose. His eyes are closed, making him appear vulnerable and without power. The black and white filter, like on Adele's album, makes the image look old-fashioned or casual. All of these features together makes the audience think they are looking in at someone sleeping. Despite his facial hair and masculine appearance, the pose the subject has adopted makes him appear highly feminine. This is a display of gender transgression, much like that of Adam Lambert's album cover, For Your Entertainment.

Figure 3: Adam Lambert, For Your Entertainment album cover (Unknown, 2009)

Adam Lambert:

Adam Lambert is well known for his radical and theatrical performance as a rock singer. He manipulates his appearance (his clothing and make-up), to enhance his look which is different and very flamboyant compared to what could be considered ‘normal’. His costuming is usually quite masculine, however his make-up makes him appear slightly feminine at first glance.

The pose that Lambert is adopting in this image is very similar to the feminine self-touching of the Adele cover, however the gesture appears more deliberate than that of Adele’s casual stance. The soft lighting (as discussed above) and the fact that he is wearing make-up makes Lambert appear quite feminine, although we do identify him as a male. The colouring of this shot gives a more fantastical feel to the image compared to the relaxed, old-fashioned look of Adele’s cover. Lambert is performing gender transgression in this shot, where he is neither completely male, nor completely female. His glove is another example of this transgression - delicately touching oneself with a glove is quite a feminine gesture, however the glove he is wearing is closely associated with male rock musicians. He also is asserting power over the audience by looking directly at the camera, therefore appearing strong and powerful.

Signs in these images:

Colour is used as a signifier in these images to suggest at the artist’s performance style and personalities. Lambert’s cover uses bright colours to signify a kind of fantasy world, which is representative of his theatrical performance style, whereas the lack of colour on Adele’s album cover signifies a more casual and laid back performance style.

The gesture of self touching is used as a signifier in these covers. Where in Adele’s cover, the gesture is used to make her appear feminine, our version of Adele’s cover and Adam Lambert’s cover uses the gesture as a means of transgressing from gender boundaries, and appearing neither completely female, nor completely male.

Soft lighting is used in these images to recreate the feminised lighting that has been used in the past on female movie characters. Judith Butler’s belief that gender and representations of gender are created by the performance and repeated production of gestures and effects is coming into play here, as these images are drawing on a lighting that has been used in the past and is being reused. While Adele’s album uses this in the traditional sense, our cover and Lambert’s cover use this lighting as a means of transgressing from stereotypical genders (Judith Butler, 2011).

References:

Barrowclough, Josh. (2016). Male on Adele's album cover.

Butler, Judith. (2011). Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.

Unknown Author. (n.d.). Adele 21 album cover. Retrieved from http://adele.com/music/.

Unknown Author. (2015). Female shown with soft lighting. Retrieved from http://www.fashiongonerogue.com/1930s-hairstyles-wavy-hair/

Unknown Author. (2009). Adam Lambert, For Your Entertainment. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Your_Entertainment_(album).

An Introduction to Our Project

For this project, we decided to look at the representation of gender on CD album covers. We wanted to show through this project that it is not necessarily the gender of the subject which makes a person look particularly masculine or feminine, but the way in which they are portrayed within an image through the use of things such as costume, make-up, lighting, colours, gesture etc. The inspiration for this idea came through research of Judith Butler and her beliefs that genders are performative and have been created through production and repetition of gestures, clothing, lighting etc. and that this is what causes us to associate certain movements or colours with a gender. She believes that genders are not natural and have been formed by human creation (Judith Butler, 2011).

We decided to express this idea by taking a stereotypically female album cover, a male cover and an uncanny cover (one that does not seem inherently male or female) and shifting the genders to see what effect this created. Did it make a man seem feminine, a woman masculine, or did each retain their known gender?

We have structured this project so that we look at the subject of each cover (as obviously they are signifiers of certain traits already as famous musicians), before looking at how they are portrayed within the image. We then compare the original cover to our version of the cover with the gender switched, before showing another album cover which uses similar composition techniques to create a different portrayal of gender again. This allows us to show how gender is performative and how certain traits are associated with a particular gender, but at the same time how these traits can be twisted to create the ‘uncanny’, someone that has both female and male traits and so does not associate with any gender in particular.

We have drawn on visual and semiotic strategies to enhance our representations and give them intended, underlying meanings. We focused particularly on using specific gesture, colour, props, gaze and subject to utilise these strategies, and have used detournement as a way to emphasise the representations of gender, and make it easier for the audience to understand.

References:
Butler, Judith. (2011). Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.