...Discuss the concepts of 'ideology' and 'discourse' in relation to the ways in which representation functions in media texts. You might like to do this in the context of representations of gender, sexuality, 'race', ethnicity, war, refugees or celebrity, for example. Your essay should include your own analysis of a media text that has not been discussed in detail in the lectures, required or additional readings, or in your other assessments. Representation is both the process and the product of media texts, in terms of sexuality in media these representations are shaped by ideologies; the way people think and interpret the word. In turn, different ideologies promote discourse and the discussion of ideas in relation to sexuality. In relation to specific media texts such as True Blood, there are several ideologies in the program, social, political and cultural which show a non-heteronormative view on sexuality. Ideologies are ways of thinking and how we interpret the world around us. It’s through ideology that representation in media text functions to reinforce the view of that particular school of thought. Representation can be through stereotype, strengthening sometimes negative views or typecasting those who are represented. Looking especially True Blood, vampires are being “re-presented” as the gay community which have to struggle and fight for equal rights(Dhaenens, 2013). The concept of Ideology, a way of thinking which impacts how you view and world and interact with people...
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...characters, the text’s poetics and aesthetics or metaphoric configurations (Krass quoted in Simbürger 53). Doty adds that queer readings are not wishful or wilful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings. They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular cultural texts and their audiences all along.” In the case of horror films [...] this “complex range of queerness” circulates through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/her relation to normality. (Doty quoted in Benshoff 99) Crucially, rather than explicit or overt queerness this research will investigate manifestations of queerness as literary tropes, analogies, allegories, metaphorisations, metonymies...
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...remain unaffected, butadvertisements both reflect and shape society norms. Compare to when society was more restricted by conservative regulations, such as Hayes Law, increasing numbers of advertisements in western culture allow queer people to represent in ways that are inclusive and respectful. Many companies have chosen to target on homosexual people who comprised a large potential market. Companies provide positive queer images in exchange for queer people’s good will and support. An example is Expedia’s Find Your Understanding, an ad released on Oct 2nd, has gained more than 2.2 million views. It is a moving tale told by Artie Goldstein, a retired business owner who described his emotion and reaction while traveling to his daughter’s, Vickie’s marriage with another woman. “That startled me. I told her, this is not the dream I have for my daughter,” said Artie when his daughter first asked his permission for marrying another woman. His arrival at his daughter’s wedding and witnessing how happy his daughter is were the turning points. “ You come to terms with it and say this is the nature order of things in your life, and it is supposed to be this way,” he said. His apprehension turned into true acceptance. I decided to pick this video as my analysis not only because it has wide audience and releases in the recent period, but also because this touching story is told from the third-person perspective, the father. Through analyzing my interviewee’s interpretation of the father’s...
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...produced. To understand an object it is necessary to study both the object and the systems within which it is produced and lives. Post-feminist structuralism seeks to examine the production of knowledge as it impacts on gender. The pervasiveness of male discourse is a particular target for post-structuralist feminism. What I hope to achieve is an analysis of the theory in relation to the character of Catherine Barkley and her romantic relationship with the novel’s narrator and protagonist Frederick Henry. For poststructuralist theory the common factor in the analysis of social organization, social meanings, power and individual consciousness is language. Language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. Weedon in Storey, ed. (555) However, within Hemingway’s novels language is used to different effect, or rather the omission of it is. Hemingway’s aversion to theory is discussed in Owens-Murphy’s essay on pragmatism. She quotes Scott Donaldson as saying both Hemingway and his characters show, “a disinclination to philosophize, much”(87). Hemingway’s own theory of omission is based on the knowledge of the writer and their ability to get the point across in the simplest way. By including omissions within the writing Hemingway felt the reader was able to see things from their own perspective. Hemingway’s Theory of Omission states that...
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...Defining the Research Problem Analysis of Butch Lesbian Mothers in Pop Culture This research makes a contribution to the current scholarship within feminist, gender, and sexuality studies that have previously not been explored in detail. Scholarship on queer parenting is burgeoning, however, it exists in a silo alongside the current literature on pop culture representations and butch lesbian identity, which is largely dated or unexplored. Bridging these fields of study, this unique analysis discursively traces pop culture representations of butch lesbian parents. Specifically, I contribute to the current research in three ways. First, little feminist research has been carried out on motherhood in recent years. There are only a handful of studies...
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...The three texts share several commonalities across them, some of which being their construction of Iranians as overt “others” and their narratives of Islamophobia, whether subtle or overt. Out of the three videos at hand, They provides the most intricate representation of gender, its protagonist never explicitly defining their gender by any means, but there is a catch: the protagonist is white. The Iranian characters in the film (and there are quite a few) are relegated to different positions. While J, the film’s protagonist, is demonstrating their inability to live up to normative constructions of gender throughout the film, the Iranian characters, such as Araz, are present to cast a light on foreign misunderstandings about Western gender and sexuality. Throughout the film, Araz and his family members are consistently shown fumbling over J’s pronouns, their mistakes cloaked in their thick accents and inability to speak English for too long, to the dismay of J and their older sister, Lauren. Even the subtitles, integrated into the film’s visuals due to the bilingualism of the film, attribute pronouns to certain phrases, a mistranslation which emphasizes inherent prejudices within Iranian society. Thus, despite Ghazvinizadeh’s status as an Iranina-American filmmaker...
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...Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism Introduction A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a work they consider important. For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation. If a critic is working with post-colonial theories, s/he might consider the same story but look at how characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, and even America) treat characters from, say, Africa or the Caribbean. Hopefully, after reading through and working with the resources in this area of the OWL, literary theory will become a little easier to understand and use. Disclaimer Please note that the schools of literary criticism and their explanations included here are by no means the only ways of distinguishing these separate areas of theory. Indeed, many critics use tools from two or more schools in their work. Some would define differently or greatly expand the (very) general statements given here. Our explanations are meant only as starting places for your own investigation into literary theory. We encourage you to use the list of scholars and works provided for each...
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...current work in this area emphasizes identity as one key aspect of sexuality. However, recent critiques of identity-based research advocate instead a desire-centered view of sexuality. Such an approach artificially restricts the scope of the field by overlooking the close relationship between identity and desire. This connection emerges clearly in queer linguistics, an approach to language and sexuality that incorporates insights from feminist, queer, and sociolinguistic theories to analyze sexuality as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. These intellectual approaches have shown that research on identity, sexual or otherwise, is most productive when the concept is understood as the outcome of intersubjectively negotiated practices and ideologies. To this end, an analytic framework for the semiotic study of social intersubjectivity is presented. (Sexuality, feminism, identity, desire, queer linguistics.)* I N T R O D U C T I O N Within the past decade the field of language and sexuality has emerged as an important area of research within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and socially oriented discourse analysis. To be sure, research on a wide variety of sexual topics had been conducted within disparate language-centered fields for at least 30 years, but such studies tended not to engage with broader theoretical concerns about sexuality. Instead,...
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...Weinstock notes how the pedagogical diversity of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” prompted him to collect essays for this book. He goes on to explain that “given the ubiquity of the text within various academic settings, I was also struck by the absence of attention to the text within pedagogical contexts. Despite the large (and steadily growing) body of criticism to the story, very little of it explicitly addresses its importance as a tool to facilitate learning or various ways in which to make use of the text in the classroom” (3). As a collection, Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper contains informed, detailed, and diverse analysis that attempts to shore up the absence of “pedagogical possibilities” concerning Gilman’s transgressive short story (9). Among the contributors are a MOO space specialist, a Gilman scholar, a queer theorist, an existentialist, a formalist, and several reader/student-response theorists. Because each essayist presents a distinct critical perspective on Gilman’s text, each essay is likewise concerned with “how the narrative teaches and how to teach the narrative” (5). Thus, it seems to me that Weinstock’s The Pedagogical Wallpaper resonates with Pedagogy’s conviction that teaching is central to our work as scholars and educators, no matter what our particular perspective. Indeed, Weinstock’s commitment to diverse and instructive pedagogical prompts is persuasive and liberating, affording ample avenues for new...
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...Ekke Kanda English 112 Vocal Performances in American Stand-Up Comedy In “Sounding Gendered: Vocal Performances”, Tom Delph-Janiurek argues that peoples voices are mediated by discourse (Giltrow 277). He explains that voices are interpreted through attribution to recognizable performances of roles and gendered and sexualized performances (Giltrow 276). According to Delph-Janiurek, voices are limited within the confines of certain societal hegemonic norms. He explains that the relationship between voices and bodies is not necessarily physiological; voices are vocal “performances”. There exists a pre-established gender duality within society, in which masculinity and the “male” voice is associated with the male body, and femininity and the “female” voice is associated with the female body. Thus, what is considered to be a “natural” voice is merely a choice made by an individual as to which of the two sides of duality they identify with more (Gamson). This choice is a representation of a gendered and sexualized identity that is influenced by discourse. Gender norms dictate that males identify with the more masculine voice, with a lower pitch and only slight increases in intonation. The stereotypical female voice, on the other hand, is more high pitched, with more variation in intonation (Bonds-Raacke). With this in consideration, Delph Janiurek’s thesis is that voices have a “geography”, and that they can be authored in a certain way within certain societal “spaces” (Giltrow...
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...Author: Course Title: Instructor; Date: A Critical Analysis of the Tempest by Shakespeare A critical analysis of the Tempest reveals numerous unscrupulous schemes that are often employed by human beings in a bid to gain power and influence. These schemes reflect the nature of people as they attempt to acquire dominance over others in various aspects of life. In the Tempest, these schemes are discernible from the many scenes where characters engage in underhand deals even against fellow characters in a bid to win influence. However, it is notable that the impact of these schemes is resolved quite amicably, although there remains a lingering discomfort that illustrates that this acquired utopia is rather temporal. It can be noted that some of the characters actually pay for their engagement in these illicit deals, although a more critical analysis reveals that this punishment may be deterrent enough as some of the characters do not seem to learn their lessons. Indeed, the Tempest creates the allusion of an island where goodness always overshadows the evil and in the end there seems to be a re-birth that signifies a resumption of normal life. (Pierce 374). It must be noted that this sense of utopia initially begins through a state of chaos when a party organized by Alonso suffers greatly from a vicious storm while at sea. This is notable when the play begins with the sound of lightning and thunder that causes “a tempestuous noise” (Shakespeare I, I, 1). Perhaps this malevolent...
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...any reader to think about its scene and how profound this story can actually be. Many different opinions have been expressed as to what the poet was trying to convey in these lines; happiness, life, or maybe even death. The poem was written during the early 20th century, around the 1920s. According to an analysis done on this poem: “...Frost wrote the poem on a hot summer day...” (Gualdoni 2). Quite an interesting piece of information that questions why Frost would use a season opposite to the one he was currently writing through. The poem itself is written in iambic tetrameter so that 4 lines are grouped together in each stanza. There is a visible rhyme scheme and figures of speech that coexist within the piece. The first two lines in a stanza rhyme with each other while the third line stands to temporarily disrupt the balance, only to be followed by a fourth line with a rhyme that will match the previous two. A broad sense of imagery invites the reader to his/her imagination and calmly surrounds them in that cold winter night. In the woods with just his horse, the snow and a frozen lake, is a simple setting the poet used for this piece. The first few lines display a character that is in the middle of nowhere and mentions of an unknown person that the “woods” belong to. “Who woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow” (Frost 1-4). Annabella Gualdoni, a reviewer of poetry, believes that...
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...critical theory today critical theory today A Us e r - F r i e n d l y G u i d e S E C O N D E D I T I O N L O I S T Y S O N New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Lois Tyson Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97410‑0 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97410‑3 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Tyson, Lois, 1950‑ Critical theory today : a user‑friendly guide / Lois Tyson.‑‑ 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑97409‑7 (hb) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑97410‑0 (pb) 1. Criticism...
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...When examining a poorly stitched quilt, they find themselves reverting to learned gender roles they'd been forced into which makes them uncomfortable, Mrs. Hale finds herself compelled to “pull out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good” because “bad sewing always made me fidgety”, and then Mrs. Peters lamenting that “I sometimes sew awful queer when I'm just tired” (Glaspell 1760). Upon the discovery of the dead bird the sewing basket, Mrs. Peters once again reverts to established norms, but this time in a more subversive way, declaring “my, it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us [...] wouldn’t they just laugh [...] getting all stirred up over a little thing like a dead canary [...] as if that could have anything to do with [it][...] wouldn’t they laugh” (Glaspell 1768). The play demonstrates the male investigators as well-meaning characters who are hampered in their efforts to solve the case by their inability to escape systematic sexism, they overlook the connection between the quality of the woman's sewing, her mental state, and the bird found in Mrs. Wright's sewing box, found murdered in the same way as her husband. The women, surely tired of this sort of obliviousness of men to their plight in their own lives, are perfectly...
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...Alan McKee lists five related themes common to popular and academic concerns about the media sphere; that it’s too trivialised, too commercialised, too fragmented, that it relies too much on spectacle, and has caused citizens to become passive/apathetic. Focusing on the concept of audience, discuss one or more of McKee’s themes using an example from new and traditional media. As social groups and fragments naturally transform themselves parallel to the stages of the development of modern technology, the concept of audience will always in turn be the product of this environment. In the modern day world, one cannot help but question if the evolution of society has been accelerated in such a way partially due to the influence of the media sphere. Audiences are now more interactive in the media and public sphere in partnership with the Web 2.0 movement as a form of new media. Even though the new age media revolution has taken over the bigger part of our lives, the means of traditional media outlets such as television are more open to all the different societies that now exist. As the quality of media outbreaks dwindles and quantity is dangerously on the rise, the idea of commercialized and fragmented elements in our society is what we are subjected to within today’s media realm. Allan Mckee in his text The Public Sphere: An Introduction discusses these topics in depth as well as others in relation to the concept of audience and how the transformation of media has affected social...
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