I really wanted our video to be representative of relevant contemporary social issues that our audience, made up of mostly young women, may be able to resonate with. I think this also coincides well with our chosen genre as a lot of alternative/indie artist's I came across while doing my research often use their work as an avenue for social commentary. Explored below are such topics that our music video hoped to address.
women as invisible entities
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, is a book a recently read which explores how the notion of “archival silence” has erased accounts like hers (that of a woman facing domestic violence) from historical records as a form of cultural violence. Although Machado discusses archival silence in the context queer female identities, I think the concept is also somewhat relevant to other marginalised groups of women in general. A majority of archived history and popular mythological literature could be considered androcentric; many have heard of the The Odyssey and The Illiad, but few may be familiar with mythological figures like Circe.
As Lorri Glover notes in her 2020 biography of Pinckney, the early generations of academic historians turned to the papers and publications of male leaders because of greater accessibility and because the history that mattered to them was the history of the nation-state told from the perspectives of its most well-known leaders. That’s not to criticise those historians for making choices based on accessibility or interest—we all do—but to emphasise that their professional focus was another in a series of decisions that helped obscure sources about women’s history.
All of this is to say that women, especially women of colour, have been sidelined in history and media due to various factors. Instead of humans with flesh and blood, they are either reduced to one-dimensional foils for their male counterparts (e.g. many tales of Greek mythology) or objectified due to male dominance in society that urges people to perceive women as sensual objects of pleasure only.
For example, a report released by Plan International in 2018 highlights the prevailing gender imbalance. The research analysed 56 top-grossing films in 20 countries and aimed to educate about the lack of equitable representation of women on screen. It revealed that female leads in films are still more likely to be objectified. Indeed, 30% of female leads ‘were shown wearing revealing clothing’ compared to only 7% of men. It doesn’t stop there, though; 15% of females (as compared to 8% of men) were shown partially nude and 2% completely naked. Men made up only 0.5% of this statistic. These numbers make it obvious that the Male Gaze–the woman as a spectacle designed for heterosexual men–is still very much prevalent in today’s society.
In such a patriarchal context, asserting your identity as a woman with her own aspirations and personality is undeniably difficult, especially in a third world country like Pakistan where problems like a lack of access to education for girls remain largely unsolved problems.
Considering the aforementioned web of issues, our music video would attempt to represent a woman’s struggle in wanting to assert her identity in a social context that inherently discourages it.
lack of access to education and knowledge
About 2 million more girls than boys are out of school in Pakistan–or about 12 million girls in total—and account for most of the out-of-school population in Pakistan. In 2018, 26 percent of girls and 19 percent of boys had never been to school, a 7-percentage point difference. Pakistan has made progress compared to 2004, when the difference was 13 percentage points. The effort, however, has left girls in the same position as before relative to boys. In 2018, the number of girls who have never attended school was the same as the number of boys who never attended school in 2004 (14 years earlier).
The prevalent nature of lack of access to opportunities that would allow girls to take advantage of a basic right that could perhaps help them achieve independence, be it literal or in terms of freedom of thought, is another issue we hoped to represent in our music video.
stuck in time
I also wanted our music video to somehow imply that these issues are timeless and may be a result of people with conservative ideologies refusing to leave behind certain values that are rooted in long-standing patriarchal notions. This is discussed further in my mise-en-scene post.
lantern of hope (literally)
Despite the rather sombre nature of the themes our music video would be centred on, I wanted it to show a hopeful narrative progression. Although our music video is largely made up of fragmented, conceptual shots interwoven into an abstract narrative, Esha and I both agreed that it would be incomplete without showing some sense of hope—a symbolic taking-off of the chains of oppression, if you will. Our props helped greatly with this too.
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