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Honors Research- Introduction Paragraph 2

Geography and gender have long been connected. Places and spaces are gendered and have historically been set aside exclusively for a particular sex. This connection to gendered spaces is especially felt in literature written by women. Jane Austen’s characters are confined to the cult of domesticity and spend the entirety of the novels finding a husband so that they can continue to thrive in a society predicated upon a man providing. Sylvia Plath’s semi autobiographical book The Bell Jarfocuses on a woman’s decline into severe mental illness and her reluctance to be stuck in the sphere of women. To expand upon the connection between women authors and spatiality, this essay will be centered on short stories written by women. Authors like Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx write short stories that are rooted in spaces that they are familiar with, O’Connor, the south, and Proulx, Wyoming. They understand that identity is influenced greatly through spatiality. These writers use language and character to illuminate the connection between their short stories and space and identity.

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Honors Research - Introduction Paragraph

Geography and gender have long been connected. Places and spaces are gendered and have historically been set aside exclusively for a particular sex. This connection to gendered spaces is especially felt in literature written by women. Jane Austen’s characters are confined to the cult of domesticity and spend the entirety of the novels finding a husband so that they can continue to thrive in a society predicated upon a man providing. Sylvia Plath’s semi autobiographical book The Bell Jar focuses on a woman’s decline into severe mental illness and her reluctance to be stuck in the sphere of women. To expand upon the connection between women authors and spatiality, this essay will be centered on short stories written by women.

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GRYFFINDOR: “I have nothing to prove to you.” –Anna Boden + Ryan Fleck + Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel: Captain Marvel)

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Honors Research Seminar- Blog Post #4

I feel like I didn’t get as much done this week as I wanted to. I did more gathering of sources than I did of actually reading and researching the sources. I felt like I was just making a giant check list and more work for myself. I went through the Norton Anthologies that Dr. Battista kindly let me borrow to find authors. That took much longer than I thought it would because I read the short bios of the women writers to make sure that they were short story writers that were somehow connected with their surroundings. I was surprised to find that the majority of my writers came from the Norton Anthology American Literature Volume E: Literature from 1945.

I feel like I overestimated the number of writers I am going to get through as I found ten writers each of which has many stories. I think I am going to focus on one short story from each author at this point and if I get time, I will dive deeper into the authors that had the most connection with space. Some of the authors I am going to be reading from are Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisnero, and Jhumpa Lahiri. I am pleased with this list because I was worried in the beginning that I would only be reading from white women, but I think this list has much more diversity than I originally anticipated. I think part of what drew me to literature from 1945 to present is the growth in diversity. I found in the Anthology of American Literature from 1865-1914 that it was mostly men and the women that were authors were definitely the outliers. The bios of the women authors were fairly similar; they were either wives or single women that did not have the opportunities to write and overcame the bias against their gender to be remembered today.

The annotations organization trick that Dr. Battista showed us has really helped me keep organized. However, I have fallen behind because the sources and stories I analyzed before I learn about the organizational system still have not been added to the system. My plan this week is to add them to the system while still moving forward reading, finding, and annotating more sources. I found a book on gender and spatiality by Doreen Massey called Space, Place and Gender. I am going to use some chapters in there for my spatiality theory.

I read an incredibly interesting article on how the South impacted the writing of Southern women writers. It was informative because it laid out all of the ways that white women were impacted by being complicit in the history of the South including slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crowe laws, and the Civil Rights Movement. The article explained how Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor used “ugliness” in their women characters to both recognize the place that white women held in the South and then to subvert the stereotypes and satirize the role that white women held in the South.

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Honors Research Seminar- Blog Post #3

As I have started my research process and have delved into my reading material, I started to notice a pattern which has made me slightly alter my original topic. I plan on continuing to read the same short story authors. I just want to change my focus a bit. My original topic was focused on analyzing the differences between men and women authors’ work and philosophies on writing. I was hoping to prove that there was a difference which was in my mind caused by the sexism that women authors faced in the literary and publishing worlds. I found that that was an enormous topic. I also found that many authors have similarities and differences and it is impossible to pin them down to whether they experienced sexism or not. I noticed that many women authors pay homage to the places that they are from. Their short stories are influenced by the landscapes they wrote from. My new focus is going to be on the relationship between women short story authors and the space they wrote from, spatiality and the female author.

This past weekend I focused almost exclusively on Flannery O’Connor. I read her one of her most famous pieces “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. It was interesting because it was one of the stories that I knew what happened at the end, but it still sucked me in. The main character is “the grandmother”. I have been referred to this character a number of times because she is a character who does bad things, but the reader is still interested in and wants to continue to read a story focused on them. I then found a pdf version of some prose that O’Connor wrote about how to learn to write. I believe it was taken from a speech that she gave to a college because she addressed people and gave advice. I found it very amusing that the same biting sharpness that O’Connor addressed the students with was in her character of the grandmother.

I found it very difficult to find any feminist theory or literary criticism about O’Connor’s work on our library database. I went searching for some of the other authors that were suggested to me last week and couldn’t find several of them in our database too. I had much better results when I started looking up biographies of authors. I found a really good article about how the South influenced different short stories, “A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor”. It turns out that characters like the grandmother were based off of Southern ideals for women and their behavior. This is really interesting to me and it was then that I realized that many different short stories that I have been reading by women have strong foundations in places where the author is from or is connected with. Another example is Annie Proulx whose has a collection of stories called Close Range which are all set in Wyoming. For this next week, I am planning on researching more theory about geography and spatiality along with continuing to read many short stories by women authors.

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Honors Research Seminar- Blog Post #2

I was surprised by how helpful the reading was for clarifying my interests into a cohesive topic which I can research and write an essay on. I have thought more on my original interests. I think I am going to work more with feminism than I was going to in the beginning. It is really interesting to me to learn more about women in the literary and publishing world.

In my map which showed my mind journey from my interest to my official topic it started at creative writing, short stories, traveling to short story authors like Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, their short stories, what they were about, and how they wrote them. My journey finally ended on my interest specifically with women short story authors and what made them so unique.

I used the naming topic template to come up with my further thought out topic: I am studying short stories written by women authors in America in the 20thcentury because I want to find out how their stories and writing philosophies are different from their male counterparts at the same time and place in order to help my readers understand how sexism in the literary and publishing world affected women author’s work and outlook on writing. I think I will have enough research to work off of and I know it is a topic that I will not lose interest in. It is still close to my Honors Thesis work as well.

I know that I can find articles and essays about the stories and authors which I can use in my annotated bibliography at secondary sources. I’m not sure whether short stories count as primary sources but any essays that the authors have written count as primary sources. Since I am trying to compare and contrast the writing philosophies of female vs male short story authors, I think essays by them on their ideas behind writing will be really helpful information.

I think the most important questions I wrote about my topic are how do the short stories written by female authors differ from those written by female authors in America in the 20thcentury? In terms of format, plot structure, characters, and overall topics? How did the women authors philosophies on writing or methodology on writing differ from the male authors? How did sexism in the literary and publishing worlds change the short stories that women wrote in America in the 20thcentury? How did sexism change the way they wrote?

I think my new topic will allow me to dive deeper into women authors. I have always really enjoyed reading works from women authors because I find that they write more from the female perspective and I have more shared experiences with their characters and can therefore relate better to both the women characters and the books or short stories. As someone who is a woman myself, I would like to learn more about the culture and history of great women writers and this new topic will help me do that.

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Honors Research Seminar- Blog Post #1

Your first online research journal entry. In this first post, discuss what you are interested in writing about, thinking about, learning about? 

I am planning on doing a creative project for my Honors Thesis. I have written stories since I was child. After working on my creative writing with Dr. Rado, I have decided that my Honors Thesis will be a selection of my short stories each of which will be paired with a short explanation of the theory and techniques that I used in the story. For my research in this class, I am planning on reading some of the short stories and essays on literature which have been suggested to me.

I am hoping that my final essay for this class may go towards my Honors Thesis in the theoretical explanations or in the form of a short introduction to my short stories. This research will therefore serve two purposes; one, the research will contribute to my theoretical and analytical writing, and; two, by reading these classic short stories and essays on literature, I will be able to use ideas and story structure that I find in them in my own creative writing. In short, I will be influenced by their stories to write my own better.

I am not sure how I am going to pull all the research I do under one theoretical framework or concept, but I do have an idea of what authors I am going to focus on. Right now, I want to focus on authors who prolifically wrote short stories. Some of these authors include Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Grace Paley, and Ernest Hemingway. Each of these authors are famous in the literary world for their short stories and for different aspects of their writing style from Carter and her beautiful flowing prose to Hemingway and his short straightforward writing.

Recently, I read one of Angela Carter’s most famous stories, “The Bloody Chamber”. It is a very dark story about a young woman who discovers her new husband is a murderer. It was when I was reading this story that I got the inspiration to do research/read a lot of short stories. I am currently writing a short story that has a similar story structure and the same element of an abusive man. It was the similarities in the story that made me realize that I could focus on short stories and the methodology of writing short stories in my research.

I think for my research the best theoretical lens for me to use when researching would be the panopticon. It is one of my favorite theoretical lenses, and one that I see everywhere. I have found that when I am writing short stories, I do put in a panoptic gaze or panoptic power structure. I could use the panopticon as the theoretical framework which ties all of the short stories I am researching together for the final essay. Another idea, I was working with was compiling the short stories into a compendium organized by the authors’ writing philosophy and style. However, I still don’t know how that one would look or what purpose it will give me for my Honors Thesis. 

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Media Research Methods- On Susan Sontag

Write blog post 500 word blog analysis of Regarding Susan Sontag and the intersectional connections between the film and her work. In what ways did Sontag’s work reveal and elucidate the “visual” through a disparate lens? What is the “photograph” to Sontag?  Is there a way to connect Descartes’ “Optics” to Sontag’s work?

By giving historical background and a summary of Susan Sontag’s life, the documentary Regarding Susan Sontagilluminates characteristics about her as an author which can be seen in her large body of work. More of an artist than a straight writer, Sontag transitioned through different versions of herself as she lived her life. Although she later said that she wished she had written more fiction, she contributed greatly to the critic of media and the world in her many essays.

In Sontag’s book On Photography, she focuses her critic on photography and the way the general public consumes visual images. This was a topic which Sontag was familiar with since she was tremendously photogenic in her youth and created movies like “The Imagination of Disaster” later in her career. On the subject of writers, she said, “C’est quelqu’un qui sont passionate par tout,” meaning they are people who are interested in everything. Sontag may have been interested in many things, but she was greatly interested in photography.

Sontag was particularly interested in the effect visceral horrific pictures have on their viewers. In the documentary, she talked about the time she first came into contact with painful images. She was an adolescent who opened a book in a book shop with pictures of the Holocaust in it. This experience would be the foundation of the ideas that were articulated in the essay, “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”. Sontag writes,

“Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals – that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not” (Sontag, 32).

To summarize, her theory is that by continuously looking at the images of war, famine, dying children, and all other painful images the viewer becomes immune or numb to the emotional effects that the images produce. Thus, a piece of a person’s humanity is lost.

This contention, released in 1977, is lived out in the modern day. Movies and TV shows depict scenes of horrific cruelty which often are lost on modern viewers who have seen so much violence and visual horror that they are unable to feel emotion to images that are of real pain and suffering. Pictures of children suffering in migration camps, in conflicts in Israel and Palestine, and even of children being separated from their parents at the US Mexico border leave modern viewers with no sympathy as they have and will see worse pictures.

As Sontag critiqued the continuous circulation of such images, she traveled to the places where such acts of violence were happening. She later said that she wanted to immerse herself in realism. Realism could only be reached for Sontag by going to Vietnam, making a documentary in the Yom Kippur War in Israel, and volunteering in Sarajevo during those conflicts. Sontag’s need to see suffering of others first hand to believe it may stem back to the death of her father. Her father died in China of Tuberculosis when Sontag was a child. She and her family did not hear of his death until a year after his passing.

Sontag’s own struggle with cancer may have influenced her notions on images of pain as well. After having breast cancer in 1975 (On Photographywould be released in 1977), Sontag would go on to have cancer two more times, dying of leukemia in 2004. Sontag spent her life as the viewer seeing the pain of others whether through a lens or not. It was when she was diagnosed with cancer that she experienced the pain she had seen in others. She wrote the book Illness as Metaphor as critique of the way society thinks about illness. As a viewer, Sontag had not felt the fear of the inevitability of death. As a cancer patient, Sontag came in contact with that fear and carried it with her until her death. The documentary Regarding Susan Sontag is a reminder of the extraordinary life she led and an explanation of how her experiences fueled her writing and critiquing.

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Media Culture & Society- African American Masculinity in “Moonlight”

            “Moonlight” is a powerful look at poverty, masculinity, and African American identity in poor black neighborhoods in Miami. The film follows Chiron, a gay black man, through his life in stages. “Moonlight” depicts masculinity and race through the relationships of Chiron and his parental figures Paula and Juan.

            The first stage, named Little, starts when Chiron is a child. He is constantly bullied at school for not being the right type of masculine which draws the attention of the local drug dealer Juan. Juan becomes a kind of surrogate father to Chiron since Chiron has a difficult relationship with his mother Paula. Paula is a neglectful mother who is addicted to crack which comes from Juan. In the second stage, called Chiron, Chiron’s life has not gotten easier. He is tormented at school for his outsider status. Chiron is now aware that he is gay however he lives in a world where being gay is a weakness. Paula is heavily addicted to crack and has turned to prostitution which is information the kids at school use against Chiron. Chiron has an intimate moment with his friend Kevin only to have the bullies at school exploit their friendship when they manipulate Kevin into beating Chiron up. Chiron gets arrested after he physically assaults one of the bullies. In the last stage, named Black, Chiron is a grown-up man who deals drugs in Atlanta. He is now conforming to the toxic masculinity that once made his life miserable. Paula is in rehab and off of drugs. Chiron drives down to visit Kevin after getting a call from him. Kevin is out of prison and working in a dinner to help support his son. The two reconnect after having a meal and at Kevin’s apartment Chiron reveals that he has only ever been with Kevin sexually. Kevin and Chiron embrace as the film shows a flashback of the child Chiron standing on the beach in the moonlight.

            In stage Little, Paula tells Juan that she knows the children at school bully Chiron because of the “way he walks” implying because he is gay. At the time Paula seems a bit sad that her son is oppressed because he is gay; she would later use his sexuality against him. By describing the way Chiron acts, Paula is referencing gender performance. In Judith Butler’s essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, she argues that gender is socially constructed and is being constructed constantly by performative acts, “…because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term ‘strategy’ better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs… those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished” (Butler, 522). Chiron does not perform his gender, masculinity, correctly and therefore he is punished.

            This changes in the third stage, Black. Chiron has internalized toxic masculine values. In the documentary, “The Mask You Live In” 2015, hypermasculinity or toxic masculinity is connected to athletic ability, economic success, sexual prowess, and not outwardly expressing emotions. Chiron is muscular and aggressive from working out which ticks the athletic ability box. He also has economic success because he is a drug dealer and now owns a swanky car. Although he does not have sexual prowess, he makes up for that in mocking other men without sexual prowess. Chiron does not express his emotions anymore unless they are emotions of anger. It is in this final act that Paula is kinder towards her son when he goes to visit her in rehab. The question remains whether Paula is kinder just because she is off of the drugs or also that Chiron is not “acting” gay anymore. Chiron is asked by his old friend Kevin “Who is you?” because Kevin was surprised at the change that took place when Chiron internalized toxic masculinity.

           It is important to point out that there is not one Caucasian person in the entire movie. Although they may not be seen, the stratification of race is felt throughout the movie. The movie works with stereotypes of black men to get to the truth underneath the stereotype and to humanize those stereotypes. Juan may be a drug dealer, but it is economic inferiority that lead him to drug dealing in order to make a living. In the article “Pretending to be ‘Postracial’: The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV’s Survivor” by Emily M. Drew, Drew writes, “Blackness got culturally defined by the producers and black tribe members themselves, as being ‘headstrong’ (‘black people don’t like to be told what to do’), ‘tough’ (in their resilience and ability to survive), and having a musical talent…” (Drew, 169). Although these are common stereotypes that African American people are portrayed as the only stereotype Chiron and Juan prescribe to in this grouping is the resilience to survive their less than perfect situations.

           Chiron exhibits the “double consciousness”. The “double consciousness” is a sociological concept created by W.E.B. Du Bois where there are, “two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers,” (Conley, 30). African Americans are more likely to move through life with a “double consciousness” but Chiron definitely has a “double consciousness” because he is also gay. In You May Ask Yourselfby Dalton Conley, Conley states, “Those operating with a double consciousness risk conforming so closely to others’ perceptions that they are fully constrained to the behaviors predicted of them” (Conley, 30). Chiron spends the majority of the first two stages looking around him to see who is watching him. He knows that he is watched and judged by his peers even as a young child.

           “Moonlight” omits certain important parts of Chiron’s life. At some point between Little and Chiron, Juan dies. It is only mentioned briefly in passing but Juan was a very important figure in Chiron’s life. Juan was middle aged when Chiron was in elementary school and there were only a few years between that and high school aged where Chiron is during stage Chiron. How Juan died is never discussed although it can be suggested that he died of a disease, an accident, or violence related with being a drug dealer. Either way, this implies that death is a natural part of life as an African American person living in a lower income area. Also, incarceration is mentioned although not portrayed. Chiron went to either juvenile detention or prison due to his physical assault on one of his bullies. Kevin also mentions in passing that he went to prison most likely for drug related offenses and is now on parole. Like death, the film implies that incarceration is a normal part of life for African Americans. This implication can be backed up by statistics from the NAACP. The NAACP states that, “Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprise 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015…African Americans represent 12.5% of illicit drug users, but 29% of those arrested for drug offenses and 33% of those incarcerated in state facilities for drug offenses” (naacp.org). The depiction of drugs and drug addiction in “Moonlight” is especially important because of its relationship with incarceration. It is not stretching the truth to say that lower income drugs such as crack are more heavily prosecuted in America because they are more likely to be used by African American people.

            Both Juan and Paula act as parental figures to Chiron. While Paula’s addiction made her a neglectful parent, Juan acts as the father teaching his son to survive in their chaotic violent world. The most impactful scene in the movie is when Juan teaches Chiron to swim. Instead of teaching Chiron to fight, to play football, or to express hypermasculinity, Juan embraces the vulnerable side of Chiron by teaching him to swim and expresses his vulnerable side by doing so. “Moonlight” choses to express the vulnerable moments to show emotion in a world shaped by race and masculinity.

Sources:

“The Mask You Live In” 2015 documentary

“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” by Judith Butler

You May Ask Yourselfby Dalton Conley

“Pretending to be ‘Postracial’: The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV’s Survivor” by Emily M. Drew

https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/

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Media Culture & Society- Women Journalists and Harassment

100 word minimum analysis of the problematic relationship of gender and sports. Continuing with your previous blog analysis, further examine Messner’s theoretical lens of sports, gender, and power. You may continue to analyze the same sport or another sport.

I thought the second section of Chapter 4 “Center of Attention: The Gender of Sports Media” brought up some important arguments about the messages that sports fans are internalizing by watching sports media. Two points in particular that are important are “Aggressive players get the prize: nice guys finish last” and “Boys will be (violent) boys”. Messner wrote, “…announcers declared that it’s a very bad thing to be ‘passive’ and to let yourself get ‘pushed around’ and ‘dominated’ at the line of scrimmage” (Messner). A good example of this reverberating back into male viewership is the harassment of women journalists in sports media. The media driven masculinity which needs to be proved constantly takes umbridge with women having a voice and an opinion in the male world of sports. Julie Dicaro and Sarah Spain understand the harassment personally. They both have been on the end of terrible online harassment. Much of this harassment is generated by Barstool Sports, a “dude” centered sports website. The site’s fans known as “Stoolies” are egged on to keep women and minorities out of conversation regarding sports. The site posts misogynistic stories to objectify women and keep them in the sports world as prizes and objects of sexual gratification. The video below is just a sample of the online harassment of that women covering sports face when they do their job. Warning: the video uses graphic language. Trigger Warning!

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Media Culture & Society- Media Coverage of Women’s Sports

100 word analysis of how Messner examines sports, power, and coverage. Choose a specific sport to analyze and discuss, using the article as a lens through which to examine the sport.

Michael Messner’s Chapter 4 “Center of Attention: The Gender of Sports Media” was very interesting to me especially since I recently read the culmination of Messner’s research in his article “It’s Dude Time: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows”. This latest article, written in 2015, shows a decrease in TV coverage of women’s sports since the 1990s. In Chapter 4, Messner discussed the many ways women athletes and nonathletes were sexualized. That has decreased since that Chapter was written but it has been replaced with polite bland recaps of women’s sports that have arguably done worse for the coverage of women’s sports. This coverage makes women’s sports seem boring compared with the coverage that men’s sports get. Commentators and announcers bring men’s sports to life even if it is a boring game with expressive language and exciting tone. If there is a story on a women’s sports, then it is delivered by obligation not because the announcers want to share the story. Also, women athletes are often painted in the media by their relationships to men. For example, Serena Williams, debatably the best tennis player in the world, is constantly painted as a mother and a wife in dominant sports media’s narratives. Along with reinforcing heteronormative values, it shows that no matter how exceptional a woman may be at her sport she is still nothing without a man and is meaningless to hegemonic society if she doesn’t have relationships with men. Another example from Serena is how earlier in her career the media constantly told the story of how her father taught her sister Venus and her tennis from an early age on the tennis courts in Compton. While her father’s ambition and drive to teach Venus and Serena is admirable, it is his daughters’ talent, drive, and athleticism that have helped them succeed not their dependence on their father.

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Media Culture & Society- Denver Art Museum

For your assignment, you will look around at the exhibits and take photos of paintings and art that draws a connection with bell hooks and Hebdige’s concept of Subcultures. On your Tumblr blog, you will post images of the art along with specifically chosen quotes from either/both articles as a way to frame your photo assignment. 

From the article, “Art on My Mind: Visual Politics” by Bell Hooks and the article, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” by Dick Hebdige.

Rembrant

“Years ago most black people grew up in houses where art, if it was present at all, took the form of cheap reproductions of work created by white artists featuring white images; some of it was so-called great art. Often these images incorporated religious iconography and symbols” (Hooks, 7).

Rembrant

“We identified with these images. They appealed to us because they conveyed aspects of religious experience that were familiar. They fact of whiteness was subsumed by the spiritual expression in the work” (Hooks, 8).

Julie Buffalohead piece titled “Six Pack Colonialism”- These paintings by Julie Buffalohead portray her experience as a person with Native American heritage in modern day America. Her use of animals is to symbolize different tribes, attributes, and parts of their religion as well as to represent animals and their characteristics.

“Clearly, it is only as we move away from the tendency to define ourselves in reaction to white racism that we are able to move toward that practice of freedom which requires us first to decolonize our minds. We can liberate ourselves and other only by forging in resistance identities that transcend narrowly defined limits” (Hooks, 8).

Julie Buffalohead

“Like Genet, we are interested in subculture – in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups… who are alternately dismissed, denounced, and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffons” (Hebdige, 1).

Julie Buffalohead

“For, just as the conflict between Genet’s ‘unnatural’ sexuality and the policemen’s ‘legitimate’ outrage can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces or subculture- in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning” (Hebdige, 2).

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Media Culture & Society

100 word analysis of the term subculture. How do certain objects and occurrences affect different subcultures? How can subcultures be influential? Along with that, mention a time where a dominant subculture is present. How did that subculture affect the society of that time, and how did that subculture signify a change in society?

In Dick Hebdige’s article, “Subculture, the Meaning of Style,” he uses the example of the punk subculture to analyze how homology and semiotics impact the community of a subculture. His definition of a subculture is a group outside the dominant culture that prides into on being outside the mainstream of the society at the time.  A good example of this is the hippies in the 19060s in the US.  That culture of recreational drug use and free sex shocked the conservative US, energizing the hippies to continue to break the societal norms. Emphasis was placed on the peace sign and tie dye. Like the puck subculture by taking on these items as symbols they changed the meaning and therefore the semiotics of the item. The hippie culture was influential in the 1960s and has lived on as a glamorized simple life because it represented a push back in the 60s against the conservatism left over from World War II. This blatant disregard for status quo signified a shift in US culture that included the anti-Vietnam war protests and the Civil Rights movement.

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Media Culture & Society: Race and Pitch Perfect

Compose a 100-word analysis of the article, focusing specifically on the ways the author examines the concept of "post-racial." Watch any TV text and provide an example of the ways race is problematically represented. Use a quote from the article to frame your analysis and bring in the Stuart Hall piece as needed.

In the article “Pretending to be ‘Postracial’: The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV’s Survivor”, writer Emily M. Drew analyzes the way race was used in Survivor: Cook Island. In that season ofSurvivor, contestants are split into “tribes” based on their race and competed against each other first segregated and then desegregated. Of the many problems that emerge from this portrayal of race in a so-called “post-racial” world is the continuation of racial stereotypes. Drew wrote, “This season of Survivordemonstrated the ethnic and generational hierarchies within racialized groups and complex ways in which identity politics and internalized racism operate inside racialized groups, particularly the Latino and Asian American communities, neither of which gets represented as complex, diverse, or dynamic in television depictions” (Drew, 172). This quote reminded me of the way race is portrayed in the Pitch Perfect trilogy. Race is often used as a joke in the Pitch Perfect movies. Kimmy Jin is main character Becca’s (Anna Kendrick) freshman roommate and is Asian American. She has no desire to be friends with Becca, joins an Asian American club, and becomes friends only with other Asian people. Cynthia Rose is the only African American character. She is also lesbian. All the humor around her is lesbian jokes and about her being a triple minority (African American, a woman, and lesbian). Flo Fuentas joined the second movie and as a Latina immigrant from Guatemala all her jokes are about how hard her life was in Guatemala versus how easy things are in the US. The Pitch Perfect series has problematic representations of race but at least they do not pretend that they exist in a post-racial world.

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Media Culture & Society- Inferential Racism and Peter Pan

100 word minimum analysis of the concept “inferential racism” as depicted by Stuart Hall. In what ways does inferential racism reveal itself in media texts? Provide a specific example and be prepared to discuss. 

In “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media” by Stuart Hall, Hall describes the differences between overt racism and inferential racism in the media. Hall writes,

“By inferentialracism I mean those apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’, which have racists premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (Hall, 20).

A good example of inferential racism is Peter Pan. This example boarders between overt and inferential depending on the version of Peter Pan. It may be more inferential since Peter Pan is a children’s book/play/movie and children just absorb the racist depictions of Native Americans without questioning them. In Neverland, there are three groups of people (and one ticking crocodile): the lost boys and Peter, Captain Hook and the pirates, and the “Indians”. The book, adapted from the 1904 play, called the Native Americans “savages” and described like a mob, “These ‘natives’ always move as an anonymous collective mass – in tribes or hordes” (Hall, 21). They call Peter “the great white father” after he rescues Princess Tiger Lily from the pirates. Later, they are depicted in the 1953 Disney Peter Pan movie as caricatures and even have the song “What Makes The Red Man Red?” It’s interesting to look at the adaptations made later to see how they dealt with the racist stereotype. Hook, 1991 movie with Robert Williams playing a grown-up Peter, leaves out the Native American tribe altogether. Peter Pan, 2003 adaptation, they are portrayed as Native Americans and really don’t play a role in the plot at all. Pan, 2015 adaptation with Hugh Jackman, depicts the tribe as native peoples from the planet they are on dressing them up in bright blue and red colors instead of portraying them as Native Americans from Earth. This inferential racism is easy to swallow in Peter Pan because it is a media text for children, so it seems harmless and it is not a major part of the plotline, so it is overlooked.

[brakerbreaker]

Media Culture & Society: “Nosedive” Midterm

          In the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”, Lacie Pound lives in a world where everyone ranks each other on their iPhones. Social media’s liking system has gone out of control as people’s online presence engulfs their real-life personality. At the beginning of the episode, Lacie is ranked as a 4.2 but she is trying to get to a 4.5 so she can gain the privilege that comes with a higher ranking. In an effort to achieve this, she goes to be the maid of honor at her friend Naomi’s wedding. But along the way she cannot keep up a perfect facade and loses points due to her outbursts. She also meets people like her brother and a truck driver along her journey who tell her that losing herself in order to gain a better ranking is not worth it. The episode culminates in her crashing Naomi’s wedding after Naomi discards her friend for not having a high enough ranking. Lacie gives her maid of honor speech, going off on rants about how terrible Naomi really is. In the end she threatens several people with a knife before she is dragged off to jail with a 0.0 ranking. Throughout “Nosedive”, Lacie experiences the effects and constraints of gender performance and class hierarchy in her technologically advanced world.

           People in Lacie’s society must act the way their society wants them to act in order to gain a higher ranking. This includes adhering to gender roles and gender performance. A good example of this is when Lacie gets upset at the airport. She goes to take a flight to Naomi’s wedding and because she has been docked some points she is not at a high enough ranking to take a different flight after hers is canceled. Lacie gets frustrated and the flight attendant escalates the situation after Lacie curses, bringing airport security. Lacie did not behave in a moderated way, the way women “should” act. Another example is how Lacie is constantly wearing pastel colored dresses following gender fashion codes. In Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, Butler discusses how gender is made up of a series of performative acts that continuously create a person’s gender as a man or woman. She writes,

“Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives” (Butler, 526).

This quote applies to this episode because everything that Lacie and other people do in this world is an act. They are just putting on a play of their gender and their personalities to make everyone else like them and rank them higher. The “culturally restricted corporeal space” is their technological world where their performative acts are ranked and judged by how well they conform to their gender and to their society.

           Everyone in Lacie’s world must be on their best behavior when they are out in public because everyone is watching each other. Even a small mishap like when Lacie accidentally ran into a woman causing her to spill her drink caused the woman to dock Lacie points even though it was an accident. This is similar to the panopticon theory by Michel Foucault. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction John Storey explains,

“The panopticon is a type of prison building designed by Jeremy Bentham… At the center of the building is a tower that allows the governor to observe all the prisoners in the surrounding cells without the prisoners knowing whether or not they are in fact being observed” (Storey, 136).

Foucault believed that the panopticon is a type of surveillance that applies to the whole world not just a prison. It is unacknowledged although everyone changes their behavior to account for the observation of others. In “Nosedive”, everyone is constantly watching everyone else which mimics the panopticon. For example, when Lacie had an interaction with a coworker at work who was at a 3.1, other coworkers watched this interaction and docked Lacie points because she showed empathy to someone with a lower status than hers.

           Lacie quickly discovers the difficulties that people in her society face if they are in a lower class. “Nosedive” explores the loss of privilege that Lacie experiences as she drops in ranking, this world’s form of class. In Lacie’s world, people can see what everyone else’s ranking is by looking at them and then having their technology tell them what the other person’s status is. Lacie’s friend Naomi is has a 4.8 rating and invites Lacie to her wedding to be her maid of honor. Lacie jumps at the chance to be rated highly by other more “quality people” (people 4.5 and above). Unbeknownst to her, Naomi is also trying to play the ratings game. By using a friend with a low 4.2 ranking, Naomi is showing her privilege and her kindness for helping out an adoring lower ranked friend. Using Lacie to give a speech about how amazing Naomi is would raise both of their rankings. In “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, Gareth Palmer talks about reality television’s use of remodeling lower class family homes to raise lower class families, “In each case a person with limited resources is assisted into a new look and given the confidence he or she needs to progress” (Palmer, 52). While Lacie isn’t extremely low class, she is of a lower class than Naomi and therefore would be getting a makeover by being seen in light of her higher-class friend.

           Secondary deviance is also shown when Lacie falls in class levels. Deviance is considered any action that breaks rules (unspoken or spoken) in a society. For Lacie, this would be cursing, getting into arguments, being rude, or just not showing enough optimism and positivity. Secondary deviance is any acts of rule breaking that follow the first act of deviance and occur as a result of the deviant label and negative stigma associated with that first act of deviance. Lacie experienced this when she was trying to hitchhike to get to Naomi’s wedding. As she walked along the road, people gave her negative ratings even though she wasn’t doing anything that would warrant a negative rating. The people saw her at a lower ranking and since she was hitchhiking assumed that she had been rule breaking and deviant. That is why they made hitchhiking into an act of deviance even though the act of hitchhiking is not originally an act of deviance.

           Overall, “Nosedive” is an interesting look into a meeting of sociological class and media driven ranking. It is an eye opener into what the real world could look like if we follow our current path of judgement and technology. This Black Mirror episode used class, gender, surveillance, and deviance to remind the audience of the dangers of taking technology too far.

Works discussed in this analysis

“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” by Gareth Palmer

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction by John Storey

“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” by Judith Butler

[brakerbreaker]

Media Culture & Society: “Parks and Rec” and Social Class

100 word minimum analysis of social class representation in a contemporary TV sitcom. What are the predominant social/cultural/class values? How are they represented? Use language from the article to support and substantiate your claim. Quote directly from the article and post a clip of the sitcom (if possible) to your blog post.

The work place sitcom “Parks and Rec” follows government employees in the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana. Since it is a work place sitcom, it is more difficult to automatically see the representation of social class, but it is still there hidden. All the people who work in the Parks department are folded into the middle class however there are some stragglers around the show. Andy, for example, is in the working class for the first few seasons and then slowly works his way into the middle class. Andy, played by Chris Pratt, is portrayed more as the man child than as the buffoon, “Throughout these decades, the few working-class men were portrayed as buffoons. They are dumb, immature, irresponsible, and lacking in common sense” (Butsch, 507). Either way he is the cause of many jokes as he goes from having no job, to a shoe shiner, to working in the Parks department, to working toward (and failing) at becoming a police officer. In general, women men working in the Parks department date are in higher social classes than the men. This was probably done deliberately as some of the women, especially the women that Tom date, are hypersexualized. It obviously doesn’t matter to the men on the show that these women are vice-principles and doctors. To the important women on the show, Leslie and Ann, these women are given respect for their jobs despite the fact they stupid enough to date men like Tom. The main values of “Parks and Rec” are staying in their middle-class local government or reaching elected positions to help Pawnee. “Parks and Rec” is a satire on government anyway so Pawnee is never really going to change all that much.