Representation Analysis-

Meghan Trainor - 'Dear Future Husband'

For this essay I will be analysing the music video for the song ‘’dear future husband’’ by the singer Meghan Trainor. During this music video there are many representations of men and women in different ways and you could even say it changes throughout the video. I will be analysing the music video to analyse Meghan herself and also the male extras to see how each is presented throughout. I will be talking about how they are represented than I will go on to talk about the technical techniques used such as audio and visual codes.

Firstly, the setting of the video is seen to be around the 50’s as seen by the quite vintage clothes shown in the video. We than look at the story or characters there are in the music video. Meghan herself seems to be a housewife who cooks, cleans and looks after the children, which was common in the 1950’s whilst the men would go to work. But in this video Meghan attempts to change that stereotype as the video goes on. Her clothing also changes throughout the video as in the beginning she is wearing traditional clothes worn by women back in the 1950's such as a long skirt and a buttoned shirt, so overall not very revealing. However as the video goes on she begins to act rebellious and begins wearing leather jackets, short leather skirts and animal print clothing, which is not usually associated with house-wives in those times, this is showing that Trainor is challenging the norm.

In this video Trainor considers herself a symbol for female empowerment, she than combats the medias and societies unhealthy obsession with women being 'perfect'. As the main thing shes trying to point out in the video is ant culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles, which is why in the video she tries her hardest to contrast against this usual view of a house-wife, and she somehow does it successfully. She's also telling us that we live in this patriarchal society sees the historical model of the 'perfect wife', who thinks of a women who cooks, cleans, look after kids and wants to please her husband. Trainor combats the notion of the societal idealisation of the 'perfect wife'.

Aside from Trainor showing stereotypical representation of women she also shows a very feminist view of how men should treat women. This is shown by the many shirtless male back-up dancers which she uses to combat the usual stereotype of half-naked women in music videos. Also throughout the video she is shown to have many husbands serve her meals, and at first a man makes a very delicate, small amount of food on a plate beautifully presented, however she does not take a liking to this and sends him away, this also challenges the norm of the wife making the husband dinner but also her disliking his cooking of a delicate small dish could show that shes saying shes not a women that likes to eat a small amount of food (which challenges the norm of women having to be thin and skinny) and instead near to the end of the video Trainor answers the door to see a man which a box of pizza and she instead accepts him rather than the other man, again this is to challenge the norm of women being thin, Trainor once addressed this before in one of her previous songs called ''all about that bass'' which showed that larger women should also be accepted and people should appreciate there curves.