Week 9 - Sexual Orientation

In class we had the LGBTQ team come in a do a presentation in our class. In listening to each of the speakers I learned something new and great about each and everyone of them. Too often sexual orientation goes unseen or discussed in media today. I believe sexual orientation to important factor about a person as this is their identity and who they are. During the in-class presentations about LGBTQ we learned that we dont really know much at all about sexual orientation. When the presenters were sharing personal experiences about coming out I instantly thought about every tv episode that Ive ever seen and it being a huge deal where people are hurt and rejected becuase of this moment of "coming out". I learned thats not always true and that families are sometimes not always accepting of changes but that many families are understanding as well as will to understand one another.

A statement in the reading of Dines mentions, "the promotion of gayness as a lifestyle tends to attach it to commodities rather than a practices of experssion of the self." I believe this to be an extremely true statement in regards to media now-a-days and unfourtunately I dont know if we ever look at peoples expression of oneslef and identity rather than promoting lifestyles to increase revenues.

Week 8: Social Class

There are many different aspects of looking at social class, I chose this video because there are some great definitions and quotes about the many terms that helped me understand stand social class on a new level.

In reading Dines, chapter 19 the new politics of consumption: Why Americans want so much more than they need, I found some very valuable information about Americans and social class. A point was argued about how Americans have been maipulated intp participating in a dumb-downed, artifical consumer culture, which yielded few true human satifactions. We often just assume that our true needs are all that we are trying to meet in our culture, but is that really true.

"Individuals try to keep up with the norms of the social group with which they identitfy." (Dines, 2003) This just goes to show that the social comparision and dynamic manifestation have longterm and continue to be a part of our Americanized culture.

Week 7: Videogames

Video games are a great source of fun because they include simulations, character relationships, and role-playing scenarios. One game that I played as a young girl was Tomb Raider, with Laura Croft, the only female videogame I know of. This video game uses Lara Croft as the main character and shows how females are equal to males. The video game industry has used male figures as the prominent characters for many years. When studying gender differences in video games it is important to consider stereotypes because of how society demotes one gender over another.

Because the Lara Croft's world is artificially constructed to require her particular skill set, the ability to combine traditionally female agility with traditionally masculine firepower, any claim that Tomb Raider depicts a role model for the real world is wishful thinking. Lara Croft excels at the kind of actions performed by her gender has absolutely no bearing on the jumping and shooting portions of the game. Her identity as a woman however, both as a symbol of strength and as an object of desire, are central to the fiction that defines the Tomb Raider series for its fans. While the male player is enticed by the prospect of controlling an idealized, attractive female body, the game's fiction requires the player to share Lara's motivations and act out the steps she takes to reach her goals. While the Tomb Raider series is designed to appeal to men who wish to possess Lara, the game itself persuades players to take on Lara's own values and goals, and is therefore said that this is a useful tool for combating sexism. Which I personally don’t believe or agree that it does combat sexism in any sense; it’s more of a prime example being sexist.

In listening to the presentations in class students found that today's videogames are developed almost exclusively by men. I think this can be a large reason as to why there are so many more obvious gender-biased views of women than men. As demonstrated through academic articles I read for my research project about videogames, the use of female characters is limited in video games and shows how racial the industry can be swayed one way or another.

Week 6: Race & Television

Race & Television



Until the 1980's, whiteness was consistently naturalized in the television industry. "This whiteness has not been culturally monochrome. Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, British, French, Germans, Russians, whether as ethnic entities or national representatives, have dotted the landscape of TV drama, providing the safe spice of white life, entertaining trills and flourishes over the pattern of social whiteness." ( ) What was consistently projected was the naturalness and normalcy of social whiteness.



For too long television in the US has had slandered view of being a white nation, with some marginal ethnic masses that were at their best when they could simply be ignored, like well-trained and deferential maids and doormen. Racism can stereotype groups differently and in my opinion class is often essential here. Racism in the United States is twofold, you are either a person of color or you are not. People of mixed descent are not permitted to confuse the issue, but belong automatically to a minority group of color.

The televisual hegemony of social whiteness has been critiqued, either on television itself, or on video, or in print, it has most often tended to focus on African-American issues. Yet in reviewing racism and ethnicity in U.S. television we need not downplay four centuries of African-American experience and contribution in order to recognize as well the importance of Native American nations, Chicanos and other Latinos, and Asian-Americans in all their variety. Too often all of these races are serotyped and denounced by social biased views implemented by society.  

Source:

Downing , J. (1998). Racism, ethnicity and television. Retrieved from http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=racismethni



Week 5: Masculinity

Out of the many topics portrayed in media about masculinity I chose to talk about appearance. Sadly, some of my favorite commercials, made by Miller Lite, are sterotypical and degrading to men. In our society we have followed this in-between-the-lines, codes of gender. These ideas of whats considered feminine or masculine. The Miller Lite commercial above does a great job demonstrating these societal-biased views of gender, implying that skinny jeans are for women therefor drink a manly drink. Accroding to the readings we did in class, "masculine identity validation is through the use of their body as an instrument of power, dominance and control."(Dines, pp 351) This is commercial did a wonderful job at displaying how unmanly the male in skinnys looks, as he even acted more feminine in the use of his body langugae.

You can even look at this example from the standpoint that a man is not masculine unless he drinks Miller beer instead of other unmanly beers. In this theme of commercials Millers actualy slogan is about not being unmanly. "Stressing gender differences in the context means defining masculinity in opposition to femininity." (Dines, pp 351) What I thought was most intersting and somewhat condradicting is that commercials Ive seen in the past encourage that a masculine man does not drink light beer. Miller actually is using marketing and sales tactics to idenitify that men can drink light beer as long as its a Miller Lite in order to still appear to be more masculine or manly. Overall I think that media is really selling itself to young-working class males in a vision of masculinity that provides men of all classes with a standard in which to judge themselves and one another.

Week 4: Everyday Pornography

Week 4: Everyday Pornography

When I began to study pornography I was interested to learn about how media shapes and portrays this topic.What I didnt know is that I would be so rudely awakened at the messages that are portrayd and instilled in our identity, background, and character from pornography. "The terms pornographic, erotic, obscene, sexually arousing, and sexually explicit are used interchangeably to refer to a diverse range of materials, from nude photographs to sexual activity between consenting adults and scenes of sxualized mutilation." (Senn, 1993, p.180)

In class we conducted a research paper about pornography and the media. In preparing for this project I went to a porn store to get some insight into the types of pornogrpahic material that they sold. I was amazed at the type of material I came across.  "Material sold in pornograpyh shops for the purposes of producing sexual arousal for mostly male consumers." (Dines & Jensen, 1998, 965)

I came to final idea that I would write my paper about pornography and its effects on violence. In a class discussion about our readings from Dines the topic came up about the faliure to differentiate between how the media tells us little about consumers relationships to different forms of media and also how it serves to further obsucure the varying conditions of production. For filmed pornography to exsist  real women, men and children have to perfom sexual acts in front of camera. In written pornography, the sex is only fantasy.

Something that I read and agree with from Dines, is that the pornograpic material that people view is not only fantasy but also "re-presentation of sexual acts, authenticated by the signature shots of genitalia, penetration and ejaculation." (Dines, pg 409) This is a significant becasue this is in direct relation to to the conventions of mainstream amd pornagraphic sex and how these position consumers.

Sources:



Dines, G. (2003). Gender, race, and class in the media. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oakes London: Sage Publications.

 

Senn, Charlene. (1993) The research of women and pornograph: The many faces of harm. In Diana E. Russel (ed.), Marketing violence sexy: Feminist views on pornogrpahy (pp. 179-193). Buckingham: Open University Press.

Week 3: Femininity & Advertising

Cutting Girls Down to Size

(gendersex.net, 2011)

Today our children are not brought up by parents, they are brought up by mass media so when they hear, listen and watch commercials, television or the music videos they are constantly subjected to the peer pressures that erode private and individual values of the home and community. "Advertisers are aware of their role and do not hesitate to take advantage of the insecurities and anxieties of young people, usually in the guise of offering a solution." (Dines & Kilbourne, Ch 26-pp 258)

(beautyredefined.com, 2010)

There is a kind of suffering in our media and culture that particular afflicts girls.  As girls enter adolecsense, she faces many feelings of loss; loss of ones self-confidence, loss of ambition, and even the loss of ones voice. It's hard enough being a girl and going through the changes in which we go through with our bodies but then to include the added pressures and influences of media is more than one can block out. "Even girls that are raised in loving homes by supportive parents grow up in a toxic cultral environment, at risk for self-mutulation, eating disorders and addictions. The culture, both reflected and reinforced by advertising, urges girls to adopt a false self, to bury alive their real selves, to become feminine, which means to be nice, kind and sweet, to compete with other girls for attention of boys, and to value romantic relationships with boys above all else." (Dines & Kilbourne, Ch 26-pp 259)

(cooladvertisement.com, 2010)

Sources:

beautyredefined.net. (2010, April 14). Salmampop. Retrieved from http://cooladvertisement.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/salmacampop.jpg

beautyredefined.net. (2010, December 1). Victoria secret fashion show. Retrieved from http://beautyredefined2010.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/victorias-secret-fashion.jpg

Dines, G. (2003). Gender, race, and class in the media. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oakes London: Sage Publications.

gendersex.net. (2011 , August). wasted barbie. Retrieved from http://gendersex.net/files/2010/08/wasted-barbie.jpg

Popular Culture Perpetuates the Hegemony of Capitalism

Hegemony

This video helped me really understand what hegemony is... My favorite quote from the entire clip is, "Ideological practice shapes and lived relations to the social formation."

In twentieth-century politicasl science,  the concept of hegemony is central to cultural hegemony, a philosophic and sociologic explanation of how, by the manipulation of the societal value system, one social class dominates the other social classes of a society, with a world view justifying the status quo of bourgeois hegemony. (Wikipedia, 2011)

Work Cited:

Wikipedia. (2011, October 17). Hegemony. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony

Cultural Studies: Key Concepts (Hegemony)

Noam Chomsky: Giving Up Hegemony for Lent

Video Reflection: According to Chomsky,"Hegemony has to do with a domination of the international system by small sectors of power. There has to be one super power which does not dominate the rest of the world in all dimensions but overwhelmingly develops it in one dimension." In class we talked about hegemony and its relation to gender, race and political economy. 

I chose this video clip because of the engaging title. I wanted to write about hegemony when discussing key concepts of cultural studies because this word is something I was unaware of even existed. Something we discussed in class about hegemony was, "hegemony naturalizes ideology and renders it as common sense." I thought it was interested how we, as individuals, work collectively in reproducing our submission to ideologies by deeming them natural or neutral. (ISA) I think it is unbelievable how we naturalize education, family, religion, legal system and political systems, culture, communication media and more.

In class we were asked to form groups of two people and discuss gender, race and class ideologies to see what similar and common ideologies students could come up with. Most all of our answers, but a few, were the same and concluded to help us to better understand how hegemony works and ways in which we fall are categorized in this concept.

Multiculturalism

"Multiculturalism"

By: LiliMayPat

"This video is the final result of our English assignement on the Multicultural World; our aim is to open people's minds so that they may accept others' differences. During the production of the video we improved our critical and creative thinking. Just when we made the video could we understand how difficult it was to make others infer, speculate and relate information." (LiliMayPat, 2010)

This video offers a lot of great visuals and plays the song, "Where is the love", by the Black Eyed Peas. I think that it does a great job at identitfying what multiculturalism truly is. "Multiculturalism is the preservation of different cultures or cultural identities within a unified society, as a state or nation." (Dines & Humes, 2003)

I believe that this video opens up my eyes in more than one way and does a great job at displaying media culture through image construction, ideological positions, and narrative strategies. I think this video portrayed to me the struggles between different races, classes gender and social groups. It makes me want to go out show the love by really helping people and situations in the community that I can control.

Sources:

Dines, G. & Humes, J. (Eds.) (2003) Gender, Race, Class and Media (Second Edition) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

LiliMayPat (2010). Multiculturalism [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEodXiX4gDQ

No Child Born With HIV

No Child Born with HIV, One Voice

This blog is a great example of kinesics. Even though there is a narrator throughout the entire video clip the images and non-verbal communication that is being represented are far more strong than the spoken words. Some examples of strong use of kinesics were; messages written on the bellys of pregnant mothers, the body language that women dispalyed to show seriousness and empathy. I thought it was a very powerful message the way this video was constructed and this really expressed meanings that modified the verbal message. These nonverbal messages and cues interacted extremely well together to encourage a stronger message to prevail.

Other important factors were the females facial expressions, eyes, body movements and structures. Some other important terminology related to the video clip and kinesics are; illustrations,  regulators, and affect display were all present. I dont think that this clip would have been as powerful or emotional had these nonverbal message and cues been present.

Interview with a Local African American Leader

Interview with a Local African American Leader:

Michele Hancock, Kenosha Unified School District Superintendant

This video was created for my Communication 370: Comm & Social Movements course. I uploaded this Interview to my "Dissecting Language and Human Communication" blog becasue this is related to the type of research about language that I am studying for COMM 335: Language and Human Communcation. I will be giving a more in-depth analysis of this below.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of A Single Story (Part 1)

The Danger of a Single Story, by: Chimamanda Adichie

This short piece is very great in my opinion and was shown to me in an ETHN course taught by Fay Akindes. I choose this piece as I think this video discusses much information about how we construct language. Chimamanda is a very skilled writer and gained interest in writing when she was a little girl growing up in Nigeria . She talked about her stories portrayed the British stories in which she read and how her ideas were formed because these were the only books available to her at the time. She goes on to discuss her interest in writing about the things that she read in these books. Later in life she was introduced to books African books, which gave her a better perspective of life of the people of her African descent and she went through a mental shift, which compelled her to write about things she recognized. The discovery of African books and literature saved Adiche from having a single story of what books are. I think that this information displays stratification, displaying different groups that make up a society, she does this throughout her entire speech.

Some really powerful things that said said were, "Children, as well as people, are impressionable and vulnerable in the face of a story." She talks much about many stories about her life where others, as well as herself, have been told about only one side of a story which gives people this default position of sympathy towards other cultures and ethnicity's. This making it impossible for us to see anything other than the single story in which we are fed. Throughout her entire speech she continues to capture my attention with her experiences and life lessons. really enjoyed this video as it taught me the, just by listening to her personal experiences, that one story holds so much power. It really makes me consider the ideas of a danger of a single story and the power that this prevails on people. This means to me that she was using these stories to display how people make judgements about people, another form of using sociolinguistics.

I was really compelled by her many stories but one that stood out to me was the story about her college professor. Adichie talked about how a professor stated that her novel was not authentically-African. She mentioned that she could contend with the idea that her novel had failed in a number of places but she didn't agree with the idea that her novel was not authentically-African, in fact she didn't even know what this meant. I thought it was extremely compelling how people thought, how Adiche thought and how I thought, about many things. Things not only including stereotypes, race and gender differences or disparities but many other ideals that we are fed. I think she made many great points in this video, some more important than others. One very important idea is that it is impossible for us, as people, to engage only in one place, one person or one story, that in order to understand things and their differences as well as similarities one must seek many places, many people and many stories. Stories matter and they are used to disposses, empower and can break or repair all in the form in which they are written and delivered to people reading the stories. After listening to a lot of her stories I have discovered why there is such complexity of language and the many levels in which language consists of. In Adichie's stories I think she displays the meaning of Isomorphic, meaning that "there is no one-to-one correspondence between message and meaning at any level." (Chaika, pp 3)

In regards to how Adichie uses language in this video, I feel that she did a great job expressing feeling, emotion and she gained credibility through her many sides of many stories. Her use of language delivered many different meanings and helped me to question my own assumptions and my ability to open my mind to new ideas. She was a very great storyteller and engaged me into being more self-reflective and she was disruptive of what she calls the, "danger of a single story." Throughout all of her video and through her stories she indirectly brings up ideas of Americanization and globalization. She identifies the relationship between her parents as well as her culture having an effect on her perspectives of language and literature. Her speech obviously displays that she has an accent from another place. She displays certain facial expressions when discussing her stories as well as choice of vocabulary in which she uses.

Why do we stereotype people, what makes this socially normal in our society? (does politics play a role in framing peoples ideas and understandings of other cultures and countries...)