Portrayal and Objectification of Women in Music Videos: A Review of Existing Studies

Abstract

This paper adopts qualitative research method, specifically, corpus analysis to review studies on the portrayal and objectification of women in music videos such as R&B/hip hop and pop. The study was carried out from July 2018 to October 2018 and data sources included Web of Science Collection, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Google. These databases were selected because they have a lot of high impact journals and they are devoted to publishing peer-reviewed publications. From July to September 2018, an initial electronic searchded about 200 articles. Furthermore, in October 2018 an additional 50 articles were retrieved. The retrieved articles were speed-read by checking the titles, abstracts and conclusions to ensure each retrieved article is entirely related to the subject matter. This, process resulted in a total of (n=62) purposefully selected studies used in this current research. Results indicate that a large number of the reviewed studies used content analysis and objectification theory. Most of the studies reported that female artists are more sexually objectified, held to stricter appearance standards, and were more likely to demonstrate sexually alluring behaviour in music videos. Sexual objectification was found to be more prominent in the R&B/hip hop and pop videos than in country videos. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States. The study recommends that future investigators should make it a priority to extend to other regions so as to expand the understanding of music portrayal and objectification of women.