Who is She, Do You Know Her?: Representations of Women in the Media

For this week’s assigned material students were asked to watch the film Miss Representation. The film is a cultural critique that exposes how the media functions as a patriarchal construct to influence and control women. Through instigating self objectification by women, the media is able to utilize the rhetoric of empowerment (through physical beautification) to completely distract and disempower women resulting in lower political efficacy and oppression. For this prompt we ask that you consider your thoughts and reactions to Miss Representation while making connections between the film itself and the roles that you’ve witnessed the media play in the representation of women.

1. Provide an example of a recent media portrayal of a female and analyze its effect on the character or figure. Be sure to mention if your chosen example reaffirms or resists the cultural critiques offered by the film.
   
2. It has been roughly 9 years since Miss Representation was released. In this time do you believe things have changed or not? Explain.

While writing your responses, keep in mind some of the following terms used in the documentary:

Self-Objectification: when girls/women internalize an observer’s perspective on their physical selves and learn to treat themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated for their appearance; studies have shown that self-objectification is much more prevalent in girls/women than boys/men 

Symbolic Annihilation: the way cultural production and media representations ignore, exclude, marginalize, or trivialize a particular group

“Fighting Fuck Toy:” Caroline Heldman’s term for the manner in which female superheroes are depicted in the media, which she defines as follows:

 “hyper-sexualized female protagonists who are able to “kick ass” (and kill) with the best of them. The FFT appears empowered, but her very existence serves the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In short, the FFT takes female agency, weds it to normalized male violence, and appropriates it for the male gaze.”

Source: https://drcarolineheldman.com/2012/04/05/the-hunger-games-hollywood-and-fighting-fuck-toys/

Photography and Rhetoric

 This week we are looking at Roland Barthes theory “The Rhetoric of The Image” and how images can be used to convey information with little or without the use of words. Even so we are a writing based society, images and pictures can still constitute meaning for us, especially in the context of advertising. Barthes talked a lot about the use of imagery in ads, such as the Panzani ad which he examined in the piece. For reference, the image can be found below.

Thus for this prompt, we are asking you go out and get creative. Take a personal picture (that means you are the photographer) and analyze the image that you’ve taken. Explain the connotative and denotative meanings in your photograph that Barthes speaks of and, if you’d like, identify any other signifiers that you can find. If there are words in the image you’ve taken, identify their function or literary message as either anchorage or relay. Be sure to include where you took the image by giving a general location.

The Many Uses of Type

In our reading for this week, “Type: what you don’t know can hurt you”, we learned that one's choice of font style and arrangement can heavily impact their ability to communicate with their audience. Whether it be through billboard advertisements, newspaper spreads, or retail websites, we find that people must use a variety of font styles and techniques to keep their viewers attention and get their point(s) across successfully.

For your prompt, we are asking you to provide an example that properly uses, or poorly uses, one or more of the following fonts and/or techniques in their work, and explain why you chose it:

·        Old Style/Serif

·        Sans Serif

·        Decorative/Script

·        Slab Serif

·        Modern

·        Leading (space between lines)

·        Tracking (space between characters across a string of characters)

·        Kerning (space between individual glyphs)

Also, feel free to visit the following links for definitions and examples of some important terms that were used, but not defined in the reading:

·        Widow/Rag: https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/text-typography/rags-widows-orphans

·        Reverse: https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/display-typography/reverse-display-type