 Gender on the Screen, an introduction to music videos. The fusion of moving images with music dates back to the introduction of the television in the 1950s. By the 1980s, with the emergence of MTV, music mediated through television evolved into its own distinct genre, which became known as the music video. So to understand the origins of music video, we need to understand a little bit about television's role in the production and consumption of music. Let's bring in Guy Debord. In 1967, following the uptake of black and white television across western nations, and then colour television, Debord ended a critique of the transforming effects of televisual culture in Society of the Spectacle. This text provides an insight into the development and subsequent domination of the visual aspect in media relations and the further ocular centrism of the western media. The spectacle, as it is theorised by Debord, is not an indictment on television itself. Rather, Debord asserts that the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. This is to say that the capitalist mode of production produces social organisation, predicated on models of objectification, which is naturalised by and through the accumulation of spectacles, or what he calls the monopoly of appearance. The development of music television cannot be thought about outside of this context, a context in which music is framed within the parameters of a commodifiable culture and fetishised as such. The listener becomes a spectator, which brings with it all of those implications of watching, even when they're not watching, they're still watching. What we mean by this is that even when one listens to the radio or a CD with no moving images, the resonances of music television, either music videos one has already viewed that correlate to a specific song, or music videos pastiche together inside the subject's mind drawn from the music video aesthetic, come into play, perhaps largely unconsciously, and produce the listening experiences of watching experience even outside of that viewing apparatus. These experiences co-constitute each other and cannot be untied. By the 1980s, with television embedded into the household framework, MTV would further transform and fuse together music with moving image. This period is perhaps best exemplified within the framework of gender representations, in particular the construction of the female body through music video in the age of MTV. Writing in 1987 and Kaplan noted that, while there were certain videos representing the post-modern feminist stance, for which Kaplan offers several examples, these were isolated moments among a plethora of text which mediated the rich sensation of glossy surfaces, bright colours, rapid action and parade of bodies in contemporary clothing that the dominant videos offer. To give just two examples, Kaplan notes John Parr's Naughty Naughty and Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love, in which the female body and the glossy world of fashion and fetish come together. Female bodies are objectified using these television strategies that link together the pleasure of music with the pleasure of voyeurism. MTV's commercial framework, as Kaplan explains, represented only those female representations considered the most marketable. One of the reasons why is because tele-technologies have been constructed through the masculinist paradigm of what Laura Mulvey calls the gaze, which turns the performance into something that can be objectified and fetishised. The male gaze is a product of patriarchal capitalist arrangements which channel the scope of drive into the hierarchical, watched, watcher, dichotomy. In Laura Mulvey's words, the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him or her. The core drives of the contemporary subject as a product of historical situations and matrices of the phallic state apparatus are translated and exploited into the structures of filming. As Laura Mulvey explains, in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active male and passive female. In doing so, that which is watched is also objectified. Or as Susan Sontag puts it, to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore like power.