Group 2C
Antoniya Petkova, Carley Bartlett, Ryan Powell, Bashir Yusuf, Jordan Muckley, Katherine Tysoe and Sarah Myers.
Since we were only four people in the seminar today, Spencer decided not to discuss our individual or group tasks, but to address issues related to the essay and the module as a whole, as well as this week’s topic – gender. We started off by saying our opinions on the module and how much it relates to our course and to other activities that we do. What was pointed out as an advantage throughout most of the lectures is that it’s not just a professor staying and speaking for an hour, without engaging us in the subject, but it’s rather more diverse – including videos and discussions over them from our side, so that we are an active, not a passive audience (as happens in our other lectures, for instance).
Then we discussed the analysis of our own work which we produced during activity week. A problem with the task is that we knew what the intended message was and we presume it was put across and successfully decoded in the correct way on the other end. However, this might not always be the case. Spencer’s advice was before we start with our analysis, to show the piece to other people we know, who’re not doing any sort of media studies, because they might raise issues we hadn’t even considered (as happened with my roommates after I showed them our piece when it was done – they had questions I had never asked myself) and actually help us look at our object from a different point of view. When writing our essay we should take ourselves outside of the media production process and try to imagine ourselves just being on the other end, allowing ourselves to think a little bit objectively and analyse the piece as we would analyse other people’s projects, let’s say, or anything we receive from the media.
We moved on to the choice of men and women in our objects, which was an area we didn’t really analyse while producing, but subconsciously we were deliberately using men or women in whatever we were doing. For instance, in the video with the girl being covered with magazines and the slogan “Do the things we own end up owning us?”, it was their idea to use a girl to show vulnerability and weakness, in a way. What they didn’t touch upon (and I suppose none of us did during activity week) is why the representation of vulnerability and weakness is the image of a woman, which is exactly the question we need to ask ourselves now, in the process of analysing our work. Or in the video where a guy commits suicide (which was not shown), the group never really put too much thought into picking a man as their main character, but it is the ideological stereotype they used – that men commit suicide, women get murdered.
We then talked about different areas of life that are heavily gendered, even though we accept them as completely normal and we’ve never thought about that before. We had already touched upon gender when it comes to media (in news, adverts, etc), but language is also heavily gendered. For instance, there are so many sexually oriented swear words for women (that not only men use, but women use them for women), whereas men don’t have any offensive sexually related words to call themselves or for other people to call them (if we think about it, even man-whore is a word used by women to call men, whereas they proudly call themselves players or playboys). Or in job positions, women and men doing the same job will have a different word for it (secretary vs. assistant).
Religion is also heavily gendered. Jesus was a man, Mohammed was a man, and Buddha was a man. Even though women do exist in the Bible, for instance, they are not key figures. And the first man, supposedly created in God’s reflection, was actually a man, whereas Eve was created from Adam’s rib. There is just so much symbolism in that, as a woman is perceived as a part of the man and not a complete independent being on her own. And to go back to language again, just think about English and the words most commonly used for human being and human race – man and mankind (same in German, same in Italian, Spanish and probably many languages). If we think back to “homo” in Latin and its adjective “humanus”, which is where the word “human” came from, it meant “earthly being”. In old English, for instance, there was a word for human (mann), man (wermann) and woman (wifmann). Both gendered terms use as a ground the word for a human being. However in modern English the word man replaced the first two and woman replaced “wifmann”, but this way it seems that the word woman derives from the word man, just as Eve was created from Adam’s rib…..
Of course, those ideas aren’t set and stable, they change. We like to think of ourselves as modern and that we’re not stereotyping or generalising and we challenge ideologies like that. And yes, men do buy moisturiser now, but it’s advertised as a man product and it’s not in a pink bottle with the scent of flowers. Eye liner for men is even called guy liner, which is simply ridiculous. But it’s the same with secretary and clerical assistant – what has been considered feminine is now shared by both sexes, but the language for it is still gendered. So even though on the surface it does seem like we are challenging the stereotypes and things are changing, because men use moisturiser and eye liner, let’s say, why do we put them in different packages and call them with different names? Why do we call women secretaries and man assistants? Why is the word housewife so much more popular than the word househusband (not even invented until the 1970s)?
We quickly went over the idea to look into our media object from an outside point of view and think about the institutions that set those ideas in the first place – not only for gender related differences, but for everything we represented in our projects. Finally, we had a little discussion onto the 101 and whether there were certain requirements as to our style of writing on our blogs and the reminder from Spencer about tutorials next week when we can get some extended feedback from them on our work. As we won’t get a lot of feedback when we receive our coursework back, anyone looking for additional guidance, not only on how to write a better analysis for next week, but as a whole as to understanding the module better, go and sign up for a meeting with them, as I’m sure time slots get taken pretty quickly.
And lastly, a little personal note, as this was our last seminar from this module – don’t you just love how Spencer is playing John Tickle from “Brainiac” in his teasers “Things that make you go hmmm” – they would ask a seemingly simple question, but one that you’ve never ever ever ever asked yourself or thought about in your whole life? And then suddenly you start thinking into the simplest things and digging deeper and deeper into everything that you know or receive. It’s amazing how a discussion on something such as gender, let’s say, can lead you to a whole new range of analysis in your head on things not even related to media, but just general conceptions and truths on how the world works. That’s pretty impressive.Labels: tasks |
