Question 10

This video is the song Poor Unfortunate Souls form Disney's The Little Mermaid. In it, it hints to the mass idea of women being subordinate to men such as when Ursula makes comments such as "you don't need a voice up there", "men don't like women who gossip and talk to much", "a killer body is key", and so on and so forth. Three articles form this semester that this video clip relates to are Butlers "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" which discusses female insubordination, the documentary Mouse Trapped which we watched in class which talks about the negative messages Disney movies submit, and Arch's article "Monsters, monarchs, and Multiculturalism" which also relates back to the same idea of Disney. All these piece give us a similar idea of how the media tends to portray women in the same way, even if they are attempting not to do so, such as Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, but even this attempt has faults. This shows how in an approach to cultural studies the media continues to portray feminism in terms of beauty and as insubordinate and the mass media would need to change in order for this ideal to change.

Question 2

Audience fallacies are assuming that the audience reacts in a certain way by making a generalization of the audience. Authorial fallacies are when you assume the authors message but this message is not what they intended.An example of these would be perhaps be in a documentary when the author assumes that the audience will react a certain way to their footage by making a generalization of the viewers and when the audience may make a generalization about the message after watching to footage but the message may not have been exactly what the author intended. These want to be avoided so that the message you are trying to get across does not get misconstrued or misinterpreted by assuming something about your audience.

Question 11

My overall argument for the semester is how the media portrays women as subordinate to men and that if they wish to achieve the same success and power as a man, they must embody masculinity. One text which relates to my overall argument is Judith Butler's “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”. A rather important aspect of her argument is the performativity of gender. Butler begins by rearticulating her thesis that gender is a performance that is never stable or absolute, but weak, reified and made powerful by its constant repetition in society and culture. Gender and sex are not natural or biological; they are naturalized through repetition and people's belief in the correct performance of their designated gender or in a sense their designated term in the binary. Western epistemology, with its reification of self and other hierarchical dualisms expressed in daily life, produces the concept of masculine domination and compulsory heterosexuality. Another text which relates to my overall argument is Lauren Ouellette's “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams”. This relates back to my argument of the media portraying the stereotypical desirable girl in relation to their socioeconomic status and how what the media portrays as desirable is what girls desire to be because of the results from becoming this way that are implied by the media. Another example of an advertisement which supports my argument is

Question 9

On The Onion News Network, i found this article titled "Obama's Deficit-Reduction Plan Includes Spending Cuts, Robbing Fort Knox, Tax Reform". In the article, it used culture jamming to comment on the deficit by stating that part of Obama's plan was to store billions of dollars of stolen Gold from Ft. Knox in D.C. Whereas this is obviously not true, the article is using elements of gate keeping and agenda setting functions in order to reach a point of critical post modernism, therefore letting the reader analyze the culture jam for themselves. In comparison to an actual legitimate news article such as an article from CNN titled "Obama: 'Never Seen Devastation Like This", the article form The Onion gives a more biased and personal opinion in the form of a culture jam whereas CNN attempts to report the news in their article from a less biased standpoint. In relation to the article from The Onion, in Warner's article on Political Culture Jamming, a good point is made. "Armed with branding techniques honed and perfected in the commercial marketplace, politicians and political parties have attempted to drown out dissident messages to better sell their own political policies....". This article from The Onion is taking the authors personal opinion and manipulating the politics it discusses in order to determine how the reader will interprit the article.

Question 7

The video, How To Make Your Breasts Look Bigger, is both an oppositional and dominant commentary on gender and sexuality. It is oppositional because it comments on the importance of the women's breasts and how that is her only desirable trait. In the end, it shows the oppositional side because she refuses sex with the handyman showing she in fact just wanted attention and control over the man. The implications of this film from both perspectives are that it denotes women and does not account them fro their personalities or any other physical attributes and also shows how the man is just interested in sex with her because he thinks she has nice boobs.

Question 6

In this American Express commercial featuring Conan O'Brien, globalization is represented through the fact of Conan traveling to India to get the material to make the curtains for his stage. Also, the exotic aspect is portrayed through the somewhat romanticized image on India portrayed in the commercial. The slums are not portrayed, the dress of each Indian is traditional and dressy when this is not the standard every day dress in their country and the overall landscape and imagery is very idealized rather than an actual realistic portrayal of India. The commercial also relates to globalization as showing Conan to be dominant among his surroundings and stimulating the economy by purchasing all the products and effort to make the curtains.

Question 5

The Urinal Game can be discussed in terms of ideology and hegemony. Ideology is the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.. Hegemony is the political, economic, ideological or cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups. It requires the consent of the majority to keep the dominant group's leader in power. In relation to the Urinal Game, this basically shows the social ideology behind choosing a urinal in a man's bathroom. One can't be too close to another man, or if there are not empty spaces to be separated by two, you go next to the smaller man as opposed to the bigger one. This relates to hegemony because the game shows these ideologies as the societal norm and that these norms are supported by the masses which in turn keeps this ideology in power because majority of people follow these men's bathroom rules because ti is what they are comfortable with and ti is what everyone does.