interview with gisele

In this interview with Gisele, we attempted to discover and understand the public's experiences with gender discrimination. As Gisele was female, we unfortunately thought that it was more likely she would have been confronted to gender discrimination in some kind of way, especially with a career in the music industry such as Opera. She claimed that working in a patriarchal industry such as this one, male managers would expect their female talent to be as feminine as possible. Perhaps it could be seen that these particular male managers would exploit or exaggerate the talent's 'feminine' features in order to sell tickets. However, it could be argued that with Opera's extensive history the traditional views on both male and female characters are well established in the genre as part of the codes and conventions of Opera. A good example of this would be the dresses that the women would wear in order to flaunt their bodacious figures in hopes to fulfil the audience's voyeurism as the audience's expected this of them. In general dresses are seen as 'feminine' no matter how short, long or tight they are. Although Opera is heavily based on the music and vocals of a person, talking to Gisele made us understand that the representation of the character and themselves as performers are just as important for the business.

Our interviewer, Oya asked a series of unscripted questions as she personally wanted to have more of a conversation with Gisele as the topic of 'gender' can be seen as sensitive for some people. The questions ultimately provided us with an insight to Gisele's own thoughts and opinions on gender.

On the other hand it seemed that Gisele's personal life effected her way of thinking. She discussed her Brazilian origin and her strong catholic upbringing. She personally felt that the music industry discriminated her in a number of ways. She exclaimed that she was never really listened too in terms of expressing her opinions and ideas that she ultimately just had to 'follow orders'. She concluded the discussion by saying that the industry is dominated by "men" and that they want it to stay that way.

Due to her Catholic upbringing she presented an interesting perspective on gender neutrality basing her opinion on the Christian belief of "love thy neighbour". When elaborating on this she explained she felt that no matter the gender of a person they should be respected and treated equally, seen as a human rather than a 'gender'.

Evaluation:

In this interview we encountered a technical difficulty with audio due to the fact that we had not thoroughly tested the audio when we began test shooting. Unfortunately after the interview, when we went to playback the footage we realised that there wasn't any audio at all, this was due to the fact that the microphone was not properly set-up in order for it to work with the DSLR. As an outcome of this we had only filmed the interview without any audio, which was inevitably most important. From this we learnt that it was vital to throughly test the equipment before shooting, even if that meant to upload the content onto a computer in order to be satisfied that everything was working properly.


written by I Joshua Manley
edited by I Gabriella Livingstone