Maintaining Norms and Glamorizing Racist/Sexist Imagery: The Pop Music Video

To Watch the Disturbia Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6zdhHLvT7k
Music Videos today are a launching pad for misogyny and objectification of women. It is important for consumers of popular culture images to think critically about what they are absorbing. Every aspect of a music video is chosen for a reason. Nothing is random. Women in music videos are presented in a way that maintains traditional gender roles, racial stereotypes, and beauty standards. Rihanna’s Disturbia video is an excellent example of covert racism and misogyny in popular culture.

Rihanna's new and incredibly popular music video depicts scenes from a 19th century mental institution. While the thrust of the video maintains themes of 'insanity' (and marginalizes individuals who suffer from mental illness), the imagery used smacks of slave bondage, sexualized violence, and the idea of difference as deviance.

Throughout the video, the black female protagonist is restrained in multiple ways. First, she has shackles around her ankles or neck, and then she is pinned, vulnerable, in a room with her arms restrained and her body completely exposed. hooks writes, “The prideful, arrogant, and independent spirit of the African people had to be broken so that they would conform to the white colonizer’s notion of proper slave demeanor.” (hooks, 20) These video images could be interpreted as sexualized imitations of slave bondage.

While this video is attempting to be sexy and edgy, and maintain Rihanna's reputation as a “good girl gone bad,” Disturbia makes light of the “sadistic misogynist acts of cruelty and brutality that were far beyond seduction,” (hooks, 28) that occurred during the centuries of slavery. “Since woman was designed as the originator of sexual sin, black women were naturally seen as the embodiment of female evil and sexual lust. They were labeled jezebels and sexual temptresses and accused of leading white men away from spiritual purity into sin,” (hooks, 33). During one memorable scene Rihanna writhes on a white male mannequin, fulfilling the role of “the evil sexual temptress, the bringer of sin into the world. Sexual lust originated with her and men were merely the victims of her wanton power,” (hooks, 29). However, while conjuring this image there is a failure to recognize the reality of the experience of the black woman during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries when she was subject to acts of “institutionalized terrorism,” (hooks, 27) more specifically rape. As Lorde writes, “rape is not aggressive sexuality, but sexualized aggression,” (Lorde, 120). The viewer is allowed to imagine this “sexualized aggression,” in the video. The main character is restrained, in one scene veiled and faceless, made to be different, a hypersexualized and an available 'other', who can easily be consumed with no fear of moral or social repercussions. While no rape occurs in the video, the viewer can surely imagine it.

In addition to the images of bondage and sexualized violence, there are constructions of difference that include the different being deviant. This video does not demonstrate, “human difference, but...human deviance,” (Lorde, 116). The characters in the video include effeminate men, a transgender female, a restrained black female, and a group of exotic 'other' back up dancers that perform in pulsating, orgy-like movement. All of the non-white characters or characters who do not perform their gender in traditional ways, are different and deviant, and presented as insane, reinforcing traditional gender performance, white patriarchal hegemony, and constructions of difference.