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.