Online Media | Revision Activity: Applying theories to Zoella and Attitude

Stuart Hall suggests that the media and the power of media representations play an important role in defining the ideological thinking of audiences regarding specific social groups.

Hall’s work focuses on the use of stereotypes by the media - arguing that stereotypes work by reducing characters to simplistic physical characteristics and behaviour traits. Hall argues that stereotypes reflect the amount of power that social groups have within society, and that negative stereotypes reflect, in Hall’s view, social inequalities or the wider views of society. In other words, the construction of specific groups as ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’ by media products mirror their social exclusion from wider society.

Historical representations of gay men, for instance, offer a great deal of evidence to corroborate Hall’s thinking. Male homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in 1967 which underlines the level of change that society has undergone in recent years in terms of LGBT rights. The construction of gay otherness was, historically speaking at least, maintained by media portrayals that were often either comic (the limp wristed stereotypes of the ‘80s and ‘90s) or predatory and villainous (reproduced even recently as the Bond villain Raoul Silva).

Attitude magazine, founded in 1994, constructs a media product that purposefully deconstructs traditional stereotypes. Funded via premium advertising, the magazine is commercially viable as a result of the growing economic power of the gay community and the power of the ‘pink pound’ as an advertising draw. The magazine, too, mirrors the social enfranchisement of gay groups. As such, Attitude offers its audiences a steady diet of gay celebrity icons who defy negative stereotypes - often exhibiting physical strength or emotional resilience in the face of adversity. The narratives of its online stories explore family challenges and adoption issues as well as exposing homophobic viewpoints. Harder news stories construct realistc representations - often highlighting mental health issues faced by the LGBT community.

Extension task:

Find an example from Attitude to support each of the following points:

Attitude constructs strong and positive representations of gay ‘icons’.

The magazine represents contemporary issues that affect the gay community, for example adoption and homophobia.

Zoella, however, reinforces a number of gender based stereotypes. The narrative concerns of her uploads often reinforce female gender based expectations in which her role is confined to domestic and beauty based activities with emotional responses to challenges foregrounded in a way that reinforces traditional femininity. Interestingly, Zoella’s feminine role contrasts with that of her onscreen partner, Alfie Deyes, who often assumes a more active presence in Zoella’s videos. Deyes' role is often presented as external to their shared home in Brighton - Zoella visits him at ‘work’ - whilst Alfie drives their car allowing Zoella to assume a comparatively passive role.

Extension Task:

Find examples from Zoella to support the following points:

Zoella reinforces feminine stereotypes relating to notions of beauty and domesticity.

Zoella’s emotional responses also conform to stereotypical representations of gender.

Zoellla is represented as a passive female in contrast to her more active male partner.

Attitude can be seen to be forging some powerful alternatives to established stereotypes, whilst Zoella offers a less subversive model. One might potentially recognise the impact that the target audiences play in determining the persistence of negative stereotypes - where Attitude raises revenue from a politically aware readership, Zoella’s younger mainstream audience might, potentially, be accepting of established gender roles.

David Gauntlett argues, in contrast to Hall, that the effect of contemporary media representation can't be explained by the singular effect of one set of stereotypes, and that contemporary audiences play an active role in choosing and decoding those representations.

The contemporary media landscape, for Gauntlett, offers audiences a diversity of identities that they can consume. The process of digitisation and the sheer volume of media channels, Gauntlett argues, gives us the means to resist the fixed identities that society constructed for us in the past.

Certainly, Attitude and Zoella, taken as a whole, exemplify the plurality of identities available for audience consumption across online media products. Zoella’s femininity - her preoccupation with feminine beauty and her heterosexual relationship with Alfie Deyes - contrasts with the variety of LGBT identities celebrated in Attitude. Indeed, Attitude’s representation of gender is fuelled by an editorial stance that is liberally pluralist with both the magazine and its web counterpart often highlighting ideological threats to gender and sexuality choice posed by traditional ideologies.

The degrees to which Zoella’s audience are given representations that offer something more than the singular stereotypes of traditional media is debatable. In a world in which identity is formulated, at least in Gauntlett’s term, as fluid, Zoella offers her audiences a sense of continuity with those female roles offered in the past. Indeed, Zoella was forced into making an online apology when a range of transphobic and homophobic tweets made by the YouTube star were discovered in 2017. Her apology coupled with her online partnership with gay YouTuber Tyler Oakley convey some sense of the complexity that Gauntlett suggests concerning contemporary media and identity construction. Perhaps, Zoella as an enabler of complex identity construction might be seen in terms of her commentary on mental health issues. Her open admission of anxiety and her advocacy for a range of mental health charities coupled with her determination to succeed, despite her own anxieties, render Zoella as a subtly complex character. As someone, perhaps, who moves beyond a simple two dimensional gender based stereotype.

Gauntlett’s ideas clearly delineate the potential effects that online texts can have on identity construction, if we are to believe that audiences are playing an active role in the texts they are choosing to consume. Certainly, the range of material available to contemporary audiences allows for a much wider range of representations to take place in terms of gender and sexuality.

The ideas of Judith Butler relate to the notion of gender as performance (constructed through a set of ‘acts’) and the subversive potential of 'gender trouble'.

Butler is not a named theorist that you need to study in relation to Attitude, but you may find some of her ideas helpful when analysing representations here.

Butler argues in her seminal work 'Gender Trouble' that gender and sexuality aren't biologically determined but are socially constructed through the repetition of performative acts. Traditional gender roles, or social heteronormativity, as defined by Butler, facilitate the construction of conventional heterosexual male/female personas, whilst identities falling outside of that binary are constructed by traditional media as subversive. Butler argues, however, that heteronormativity is itself a construct - a construct that is openly acknowledged in a post traditional society.

Interestingly, Zoella’s uploads openly engage in performance in order to actualise gender. Zoella’s makeup tutorials allow for the construction of femininity, and offer Zoella’s audience mechanisms through which they can feel naturally female. Interestingly, Butler argues that hegemonic heterosexuality requires, “a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealization.” Zoella’s beauty ‘hauls’ are in this sense a ritualistic act, a repeated performance that allows both her and her audience to realise their gender - to realise an idealised state that no one actually inhabits.

Conversely, Attitude offers what Butler famously called ‘gender trouble’, and, as Butler herself argues, assuming a 'subversive' gender role often requires the repetition of ‘painful and oppressive’ gender norms. Attitude creates a space in which the ramifications of assuming what may historically have been considered a subversive identity can be freely examined with articles that explore the link between mental health issues and being gay. Such writing openly acknowledges the continued tensions that exist for individuals who assume subversive gender roles in terms of heteronormativity. The transition of the magazine to a more mainstream status in more recent years reflects too the transition towards what might loosely be called a ‘post traditional’ society - a society which openly acknowledges our sexualities as socially constructed.

Butler’s assertion that gender isn’t a given, but is forged through performative expression is clearly evidenced through both set products. Furthermore, her critique of heteronormativity as a natural state prefigures much of the wider inclusion of non-traditional sexualities that are beginning to be included within the contemporary media - a move very much spearheaded by Attitude magazine.