The purpose of this research is to explore gender representation in music videos on MTV Base Africa. The study attempts to determine if dominant hegemonic portrayals exist or whether space is made for alternative gender portrayals. The research involved observing and analysing a range and recurrence of masculine and feminine constructions. A random sample of 20 local and international music videos broadcast between January and May 2009 formed the basis of the analysis. A qualitative research design was used and data collected through a focus group method and semiotic analysis of music videos. The focus group sample was representative of selected groups in KwaZulu-Natal (Bluff and Westville). The results show that contesting discourses of power relations (race, class and gender) are in play. It appears that both counter hegemonic and hegemonic gender representations were present within the sample of music videos. The study demonstrates that competing gender discourses, including subordinate, ambiguous, high-class, low-class, middle-class, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic femininities and masculinities are operative. The conclusion reached is that contending gender constructions are present in music videos on MTV BASE Africa. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

From the content analysis of 23 "classic" gay porn videos, produced by Falcon Studios, the emergence of the Falcon formula---a pornographic model of sex---is described in this thesis. This formula is analyzed with regard to the feminist critique of pornography and the assertions of gay advocates. Although the Falcon formula supports the feminist perspective with respect to the representations of sex practices, the linkage between femininity and getting fucked, as indicated by Dworkin, was not found in the selected Falcon videos. In fact, Falcon videos subvert this linkage by depicting masculine men fucking other masculine men. And, in accord with the claims of gay advocates, Falcon videos largely represent gay men having sex as opposed to straight men having homosexual sex. The Falcon formula appears to have developed not only in reaction to stigmatizing stereotypes of effeminate gay men and in reaction to the linkage between femininity and getting fucked, but also in response to the fantasy (of gay viewers) of being accepted into an exclusively male community.

This thesis focuses on the work of policing, regulating and monitoring of New Zealand public censorship classifications. It follows the processes and agents involved in the day-to-day practices of the enforcement of the classifications given to objects by the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Responsibility for the enforcement of the classification decisions of the Office is delegated to private agents and agencies involved in supplying audiences with classified media products - cinemas, video stores, bookstores and libraries. The thesis also documents enforcement undertaken directly by public agents of the Censorship Compliance Unit. In this case enforcement is concerned with unclassified publications circulating on the Internet. The thesis argues that the networks of agents assembled for the practices of enforcement evolve as the forms of media evolve or change. The thesis focuses on the modes of interaction between agents, media and publics enacted in the different sites of the cinema, the bookstore, the video store, the library and the Internet. It documents the work of enforcement involved in the purchase of images for a fixed period of time in the fixed site of the cinema; the purchase of books from the fixed site of the bookstore; the hire of video films and video games from the fixed site of the video store; and the borrowing of books and videos from the fixed site of the public library. It contrasts the work of enforcement in these different sites with the development of new work practices involved in the interactive, fluid and seemingly intangible yet still policed site of the Internet. It documents how the responsibilities for, and the practices of, enforcement shift between public sites of enforcement to the increasingly difficult public monitoring of the private consumption of images distributed through the media of the Internet. It pays attention to how different methods and strategies of enforcement have been developed in response to both the classification and consumption of the expanding variety of mobile media and the proliferation and consumption of images in the unclassified and fluid world of the Internet.

This study investigated the relationships between young women's attitudes and exposure to violence, objectification of women, and sex-role stereotypes. The research analyzed whether or not viewing sexual content or violence in music videos affected young women's current moods or changed attitudes about sexual beliefs. Music videos were selected from cable television networks and music Web sites. Sixty-six undergraduate women at a Midwest university were exposed to six music videos with violent, sexual, or neutral content. Pretests and post-tests were used to assess any change of mood or attitude after viewing music videos. Results showed no significant change in sexual beliefs for any of the three groups. The group viewing neutral videos demonstrated a significant change in mood prior to viewing the music videos between the groups. The data suggested the method of selection of participants, use of pretests and post-tests, effects of music, and desensitization to violence and sexual content may have played a role in the outcomes of the study. / Department of Journalism

Streaming audio/video contents over the Internet requires large network bandwidth and timely delivery and playback of the media data. However, large network latency and jitter cause long start-up delay and frequent unwanted pauses in the playback, respectively. An entire audio/video media file cannot be cached due to intellectual property right concerns of the content owners, security reasons, and also due to its large size. This makes a streaming service hard to scale using conventional proxy caches. Media file compression using variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoding is often preferred in order to get constant quality compressed videos. VBR-encoding produces traffic burst, which not only wastes bandwidth but also inserts hiccup in the media playback. The standard frame sequence of a compressed video stream is only suitable for normal playback. lts inter-frame dependency makes it difficult to play it in interactive playback modes, such as fast forward/backward, jump and play backward. Moreover, different interactive clients generally ask for different playback sequences. Hence, they cannot be served together using a common server stream. Therefore, as the frequency of interaction increases, an ordinary scalable streaming service transforms into a non-scalable service. In this thesis, we present a new proxy based constant-bit-rate (CBR) streaming scheme that allows a server to transmit a VBR-encoded video at a fixed rate, close to its mean encoding bit-rate, and deals with the network latency and jitter issues efficiently without caching an entire media file at the proxy. We use a prefix buffer at the proxy to cache the prefixes of popular videos in order to minimize the start-up delay and to enable near mean bit rate streaming. We present a new proxy based scalable streaming scheme that uses our CBR streaming scheme. We use the smoothing buffer at the proxy not only to eliminate jitter and traffic burst effects but also to enable many clients to share the same server stream. We also present a new interactive and scalable streaming scheme, which divides a video stream into several logical segments and provides segment-by-segment interactive playback options to the clients. We use hybrid temporal-data-partition scalable encoding to create a suitable playback sequence for the interactive playback modes. Experimental result shows that our streaming scheme remains fully scalable even when all the clients are highly interactive. As further improvements, we present a new on demand and user driven segmentation and proxy buffer provisioning (prefix caching) mechanism for our interactive and scalable streaming scheme in order to avoid buffer over provisioning at the proxy as well as to avoid the use of complex video segmentation algorithms. We also present a new collaborative-proxy-peering system in order to get better resource utilization and performance from a set of proxies that are used to stream a video. Mathematical expressions to compute the precise sizes of the prefix and the smoothing buffers as well as the precise amounts of bandwidth requirements have been developed. All our streaming schemes have been analyzed and the results of Java simulation programs have shown their effectiveness.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2004. / Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2009. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-162). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (MFA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2009. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Dennis Aig. Never Wash Away is DVD accompanying the thesis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-53).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Includes filmography and discography.

Thesis (M.S. Ed.) - - Bank Street College of Education, New York, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 27-29) and abstract.