(Required 4/10) Gendered Violence

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Kate: As I read the chapter on gendered power and violence, I was honestly saddened, horrified, and shocked all at the same time. It’s just so hard to believe how prevalent gendered violence and abuse is in our society and around the world. As I was reading, I was reminded of the movie, “Enough”, which features Jennifer Lopez as an abused wife whose life is at risk because of her abusive husband. In the film, she decides to try and take control of what is happening and trains to be able to protect and defend herself and her child. Here is a clip from the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJlrD1NFatY

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MissRep Extra Credit

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Claudia: First off, I want to say that I loved watching this documentary. I thought the fact that it had so many influential and powerful women featured in the commentary spoke volumes about the importance of the message it aimed to spread. I had seen this documentary before, but as I watched it again during the end of a semester in which two of my classes were focused on analyzing media, I felt that I understood it in a new light. The message is always alarming no matter how you view it: if things don’t change now, it’s only going to worse. And media is doing way more harm than good for the minds and perceptions of its young (and old) viewers. Continue reading →

4/24 Gendered Media (Required)

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Brittney: I was so surprised that with all of our discussion on gendered media, Axe advertisements have not come up. Axe is one of the leading men’s grooming products in the world. Their success is largely due to their controversial and hyper sexualized advertisements that are displayed throughout magazines, billboards, and television. All of Axe’s advertisements consist of scantly clad women along with some sort of sexual innuendo. They revolve around the theme of seduction in which the woman makes the first move. Here is one of their commercials that aired a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9tWZB7OUSU
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(4/19) REQUIRED Gendered Advertising

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Maya: While reading “Advertising Gender” by Suzanne Romaine, a part that struck me as fascinating was when she touched on how advertisers attempt to grab our attention in 30 seconds by using stereotypes that are familiar to us. The reason why I wanted to touch on this is because I don’t believe that I pay more attention to advertisements that include the stereotypical hegemonic families and people. In fact, I believe the opposite. When I see an advertisement, on television for example, I tend to zone out if it does not have a different or exciting component to it. If an advertisement comes on TV for a cleaning product and includes a white female cleaning her kitchen, I am not going to remember the product because it is like every other cleaning commercial.

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Media & What We Think About (Required)

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“Media don’t necessarily tell us what to think, but they do tell us what to think about – which issues, events, and people merit our attention.”

Gus – I really liked the above quote from Chapter 11. We’ve done a great deal of discussion in (and out, I’m sure) of class about how depictions of gender shape our views, and certainly that’s incredibly important. What we haven’t talked about nearly as much is not how, but what media depict. Regardless of the side a particular source of media takes on an issue, the fact that it is at all being discussed makes it something worth seeing/hearing/reading about. Similar concepts exist in linguistics, as the SCOM students among us have heard many times before – we have no words for concepts unimportant to us as a culture, and the number of words we have for a particular thing indicate, to some degree, its cultural importance. Relatedly, heteronormative and transphobic are not currently in the dictionary (but bromance is, ironically enough). Continue reading →

(Required 4/12) What’s the definition of beautiful?

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Jaqlyn: I thought Susan Bordo’s article was altogether super interesting, disturbing, insightful and sad. Her comparison of eating disorders to consumer capitalism was especially neat.  The following quote is one that stuck out to me during the reading and I keep thinking about it.

“Bulimia embodies the unstable double bind of consumer capitalism, while anorexia and obesity embody an attempted resolution of that double bind.”

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Kanye’s Latest Excuse for Murder (not required)

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I don’t know how many of you went to the screening of Miss Representation last Thursday, but for those of you did go (and those of you who, of course, are going to watch it because it’s so awesome ;), you see that a lot of things about our media culture are pretty messed up. Women are often portrayed as objects to be dominated by men; this view of women as subordinate to men is so pervasive that countless advertisements, videos, and movies depict women being physically and sexually dominated. Although we have progressed as a society (the waves of feminism are a testament to how far we have come), we still have a long way to go.

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(Required 4/10) The Language of Love, Entiendes?

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(FRIENDS Video Clip: Difference between Women & Men)

Kimani: This past weekend I was watching one of my all time favorite shows, FRIENDS (the link provided above), and a particular clip went along with Wood’s Chapter 9, specifically the phrase about needing to be “bilingual – to learn to understand and use both ways of expressing and experiencing intimacy” (Wood, p. 210). In the video clip, Rachel and Ross kissed for the first time, reported back to their guy friends/girlfriends respectively, and described the kiss in completely different ways. The idea of gendered specific ways of expressing intimacy was something I paid attention to in my personal

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