By Francesca Carter

Angela McRobbie is currently Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She offers one of the most sophisticated and thoughtful analyses of gender and actual popular culture today.

Her early research work on the relationship between teenage girls and magazines, in the 1970s, involved a rather simplistic model of beliefs and how this might be absorbed by readers.

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

Mulvey is best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen.

Stuart Hall, now Professor of Sociology at the Open University, was a major figure in the revival of the British political Left in the 1960s and '70s. Following Althusser, he argues that the media appear to reflect reality whilst in fact they construct it.

Stereotypes Legitimize Inequality: "A way to ensure unequal power relations are maintained is to continually stereotype -GTAV is a misogynist video game where players have the opportunity to kill prostitutes in their own violent way - the game is entirely male point of view and arguably serves to maintain dominant male culture".

Binary Oppositions and Subordinate Groups: "Levi-Strauss' theory is a way of understanding how representation are deliberately placed in binary opposition to ensure the dominant culture is maintained and the minority representations is seen as subordinate and marginalized. In Game of Thrones southern regional identity is often seen as the preferred culture through representation within the mise-en-scene - there is more money in the south, the southern King speaks with an elaborated language code, the buildings have cleaner lines, dress code is smarter and there is significant daytime shooting. In the North the scenes are often shot at night, characters are rougher, have long hair and beards and are often seen heavy drinking and shouting, talking in an aggressing way about battles and conflict".

Genre in Constant Process of Negotiation and Change: "Genre must respond to socio-economic and cultural change e.g. Brokeback Mountain has elements of the western (setting, objects and props, dress code) to develop a emotive romance about two men and their love for each other".

Producer as Consumer (Prosumer): "Media Studies students regularly make their own short film productions but are also regular consumers of the media - in doing so they are both producer and consumer blurring the boundaries of traditional media consumption".

Hyper Reality: "Some texts are difficult to distinguish in terms of the representation of reality from a simulation of reality e.g. Big Brother. The boundaries are blurred as codes and conventions create a set of signifiers which we understand but in fact the representation is a copy of a copy".

Stereotyping is Shorthand for Identification: "One way that texts like Waterloo Road and Skins for example allow for audience identification is through stereotyping and giving characters an extreme representation".

Stereotyping has Elements of Truth: "Although stereotyping can have negative effects often it is based of some degree of reality but distorted and manipulated for the purpose of entertainment values".

Judith Butler – queer theory