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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvNrJk0Z2-A
shows women as:
housewives
emotional/sobby
uneducated?

the mother, who is complaining that her son is using microwave Basmati is probably a housewife because she is at home and obviously cooks. She is portrayed as traditional because she disapproves of microwave rice and thinks it should be cooked properly. It also shows her as being good for two things, cooking and children, when she talks about giving birth to him (stereotypical 'mother').
The woman sobbing on the sofa, shows women as emotional.
The girl sitting on the sofa, shows girls should be at home with their mothers, she is not at work, in the whole advert there is no man shown to be at home, the only male shown is successful because there is a picture of him at his graduation, also the guy in the supermarket who is obviously of a high position because he is dealing with complaints and is dressed smartly, as apposed to a supermarket uniform, the people who are at the checkout are women=uneducated.

Close textual analysis of a chosen scene

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI2pFmVPRxQ

This clip shows Bree as being an old fashioned obsessive mother. Gabi as being sex obsessed and 'desperate' and unfaithful.

Dictionary words

Advertisement:when Desperate housewives first started, their marketing was successful as they aired plenty of adverts on tv, and a lot of billboards were also promoting it. the adverts during the programme also suggest the target audience of women, as the adverts are advertising, shampoos, and in general women products.

Billboard:when Depserate housewives was first starting, there were loadsss of advertisements on billboards, and were eye catching because the women were looking very glam.

Celebrity:Susan Myer, also known as Teri Hatcher, is a hugeeee celeb. she is best known from Superman. She is the biggest celeb out of them all, and it think her being in the programme obviously did attract more people to watch it because she is well known, and therefore the show did not make the programme look like 'any old new programme'.

Diegetic Sound:the programme has both diegetic and non diegetic sounds. the non diegetic sound is a very affective music playin which is similar/same as the theme tune, it plays when something is about to happen, such as when one of the women get angry and take action. Also, there is a voiceover who talks us through the programme.

Equilibrium: Todorov's theoryis supported in Desperate Housewives. the beginning starts with the characters jus beginning to plot their revenge on someone or something similar (equilibrium), the dsruption is done, then in the end everything will be fine amongst the characters, however, the audience know something 'bad' is happening, which the charcters discover in the next episode, and the cycle goes on...

Fantasy: the lives of the desperate housewives could be seen as a 'fantasy' because they live in massive houses, have loads of money, nice cars and fit partners!

Genre: the genre of Desperate Housewives is comedy/drama.

Hypothesis: the hypothesis of my coursework is going to be along the lines of: the women in desperate housewives are portrayed in an objectifying way as they are seen as causing disrutption, the title etc.

Institution: the institution is Channel 4 which is well established.

Kiss and tell: desperate housewives seem like women who men would do a 'kiss and tell' on.

Linear narrative: desperate housewives does not have a linear narrative, i think...it has flashbacks.

Mis en scene: it is set on a street, Wysteria Lane. the clothes the women wear are very glamerous (apart from Lynette) this helps with fantasy.

Laura Mulvey

Research on Laura Mulvey:

British feminist film theorist.
Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire.
Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey


Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’. Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html