Admittedly, writing an open blog for a public audience was something that initially confounded me. While I admire blogs and enjoy reading them, the tone and style generally used by bloggers is a completely foreign mode of expression from my own. For the most part, my writing voice has been conditioned to favor an academic tone. Accordingly, one of the greatest challenges I faced with this assignment was finding an appropriate voice to drift between the subjective and objective, and analyze topics through both a casual and academic lens. Still, I genuinely enjoyed writing this blog; each post granted me the freedom to explore nuanced styles and address issues that I am passionate about. In addition, I was able to do research on interesting topics, and be creative with the videos and images for my posts. On the whole, for this assignment, I utilized class themes like intersectionality, truth, and underlying cultural narratives as a medium to bridge the gap between the material read in class and real world issues.
In my first post, I explore how Mary Karr's The Liar's Club reveals a truth about child abuse that the real world often ignores. This memoir has such a poignant portrayal of abuse. Instead of presenting it as black and white, it is depicted as something complex and convoluted by circumstance. In other words, the abuse that she experienced happened close to home, usually inflicted by someone she knew or trusted. With a few links to outside sources, I make a case that Karr exposes the reality that the majority of child abuse takes place close to home. Following, I use this insight as a premise to critique the widely used educational slogan, "stranger danger." Overall, the purpose of my post on The Liars Club is to suggest that sometimes subjectivity (i.e. a memoir) is the best way to recognize a truth that the idealized narratives in our society and culture have obscured. My next post is about Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, Fun Home, wherein I explore the impact of culture, sexuality, and gender on identity. In doing so, I review some of the history of the LGBTQ community's challenges and activist organization in relation to both Alison and Bruce's identities. This post has everything to do with a topic we frequently discussed in class, the theme of intersectionality. This theme is especially prevalent in relation to my writings on the LGBTQ community today, in particular, my focus on the experience of transgender identities. I end my post with a Buzzfeed video that details personal testimonies on the struggles faced by transgender folk in order to spark empathy and awareness for the trans community today. In sum, I use this post to prove the influence that intersectionality, in terms of culture, gender, and sexuality, has on identity; and that this concept is evident in both literature and reality. My third post presents a discussion on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's realistic fiction, Americanah. In this post, I employ a framework similar to the one I used in The Liars Club; I focus on literatures ability to tell the truth. One of my favorite quotes from her novel proposes, “In America, racism exists but racists are all gone" (315). I use this quote as the premise of an argument about the one sided racial discourse in our country. Adichie's words expose a truth that racism has been a burden that the victim actively carries and the perpetrator denies. I compare this message to a TED Talk about sexual violence in America and argue the similarities between the discourses of sexual violence and rape. To sum up, this post uses the insight from Americanah to prove how useless reactionary discourse is, while advocating the use of honest discourse in America today. In my fourth post, I examine the similarities between the gaming and sports community, and the online harassment that women face for doing their jobs. This blog post relates directly to our class discussion on Anita Sarkeesian, video games, collective identity, and hostility (both in real life and online) directed toward women in male dominated industries. This posts features a link to the blog used as a source in my writings on women in sports. In closing, I attach an emotional video that humanizes the women of sports journalism who regularly receive online abuse. Essentially, this post builds on our class discussions while promoting empathy for the very pertinent issue of online misogyny in today's world. As for my last post, I use the dystopian fiction, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, as a gateway to a criticism on the pervasive whiteness, maleness, and straightness in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Specifically, this post analyzes the lack of diversity in science fiction and fantasy film. Although I do not directly link my discussion on film to Station Eleven, this post centers on a theme often mentioned in class. That is, the underlying cultural narratives in mainstream media, and the people who are routinely left out of them. Here, I link videos, images, and statistics to demonstrate the lack of diversity in Sci-fi and fantasy film today. Lastly, I address a few advances in the fantasy and science fiction world as of last year. In essence, this post examines how partial our mainstream narratives often are, and encourages diverse representation for the future. More and more, I am grateful for literature as a medium that can challenge our personal bias and pierce the veil of western ideals in our culture. These posts aim to highlight the truth and complexity of reality that literature can reveal, challenge the regions of modern culture where marginalization and hostility are acutely evident, and offer prospects for change. Overall, I enjoyed writing these pieces, as I was able to explore my own creative voice, research contemporary issues, and more fully understand the material and themes discussed in class.
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It's safe to say that the end of the world has been a topic of speculation and fascination throughout human history. I would guess that's what makes it such a popular theme in the media. Most often, the post apocalyptic narrative shows up in genres like dystopian fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Recently, I finished reading a dystopian fiction by Emily St. John Mandel entitled, Station Eleven. Although I don't actively read dystopian fiction, the few that I have read were impressionable, Station Eleven included. Mandel's story moves back and forth between two worlds, pre and post collapse, wherein a deadly epidemic left the world desolate and uncivilized. Although I enjoy dystopian fiction film and literature, the majority of those I've encountered seem to be set in fictional worlds where whiteness, maleness, and straightness are pre-selected standards. In all fairness, it might come off a bit strange to be constantly pointing out a character's race in literature. So while it shouldn't be exempt from criticism, representation in dystopian fiction film is more of a concrete and direct phenomena. For this reason, I'll be directing my attention to media representation in dystopian fiction film using the more extensive genres of science fiction and fantasy. Admittedly, what got me thinking about the lack of diverse characters in the world of fantasy and science fiction was a sketch from Comedy Central's, Key and Peele. To put it briefly, it's about racist zombies. I'm sure this sounds insignificant and a bit absurd, but it has meaning. Essentially, the sketch uses comedy as a medium to drive a point about the mainstream narratives in our culture and the people who are routinely left out of them. It starts out like any other zombie apocalypse, with two men racing to escape assault and infection. However, contrary to the usual zombie hostility, it's as if the men are invisible; and in a satirical turn of events, the zombies won't bite them. In a way, White Zombies is playing on the fact that people of color have been virtually deleted from the narrative of science fiction in our culture. While it works out for the best in the video, in reality, the lack of diversity in Sci-fi is a huge issue. In fact, data on the top 100 grossing science fiction and fantasy films from The Open Book's findings in 2014 revealed that this genre has a severe bias toward placing white, straight men in prominent roles (the blog post is super interesting, click here to view it). As demonstrated in the image below, there is a clear shortage of diverse characters in science fiction and fantasy. The fact that there were zero protagonists played by women of color and LGBT actors is beyond disappointing. What's more, out of the eight movies featuring black male protagonists, six of those roles were played by the same actor. Lastly, it was recorded that women as a whole occupied only twelve percent of the protagonist roles while people with a disability portrayed as little as two.
I grew up loving video games and was raised a huge fan of consoles like Nintendo 64 and Game Cube. Despite the fact that I hardly play them now, it's easy for me to understand the nostalgia and sentimentality that surround video games as a media form and create communities full of devoted followers. Even so, the community as a whole has its downfalls, the most obvious being its tendency to revert to online abuse in response to the presence and criticism of female voices. One fairly well known case of this phenomena is what resulted from Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency youtube channel in 2013. To put it lightly, in response to her video detailing the misrepresentation of women in video games, the community personally attacked her by publicly derogating and abusing her online. Shortly after, PBS Digital Studios posted a video on their youtube channel which interpreted this hostile backlash as a response to the threat that women pose to the gaming community's collective identity. Although a good amount of women play video games, the culture is seriously male dominated, so PBS understood her presence and criticism to have sparked a sort of identity crisis. On another note, understanding the community's hostility through a lens of group identity resonates with my own general experience playing video games. Although I started playing at a young age, the anti-female atmosphere was evident early on. It goes without saying, but the gaming community isn't the only industry that presumes male dominance and overreacts to a strong female presence. Not surprisingly, the sports industry has proven to be extremely hostile to women who find success as sports journalists. Similar to gaming, the climate and history of sports journalism is critically anti-female. According to a blog post from 2016 on Working in Sports, female sports journalists are the most likely to receive hateful, threatening, and misogynistic comments on social media. Along with being constantly delegitimized by objectification in the media, the blog specifies that women in the sports industry are also "faced with harassment from fans, the athletes themselves and even their own colleagues" (x). While this sort of behavior is lamentable regardless of the context, what is especially pejorative is that the women are being faced with such an extensive amount of intimidation for simply doing their job. I know that statistics and words alone don't do much to humanize the women who are experiencing so much unwarranted online aggression, so I thought a video might be the best way to communicate the gravity of this sort of antagonism and objectification. The video is titled "Women in Sports 'Face' Harassment" for a reason; it features two successful female sports journalists and a few men who read the graphic comments from the women's social media aloud. Although the men reading the comments are not the same people who wrote them, the mere act of saying them out loud is unconditionally outrageous. The video starts out with some awkward laughs but eventually both the men speaking and the women listening are disquieted. In fact, the men found themselves struggling to disclose certain comments because they were so hostile. It says a lot about how relevant anonymity and distance are to online harassment and misogyny. Reading a comment out loud and undisguised restores an element of humanity that sometimes gets lost in the words behind a screen. Clearly, there is still work to do in the prospect of respecting and recognizing each other as equals. The content is explicit and the language is violent, but this video solidifies and humanizes the experience of online harassment in today's world. For that reason, I think it's worth the watch.
Adichie's idea reminds me a lot of a TED talk I recently watched. In his speech on sexual violence in America, scholar, Keith Edwards presents a similar argument about the discourse between men and women. In a nuanced way, his talk begins in stating that in America, there is rape but no rapists. He visualizes our society's idea of rapists, something that is often obscured as an evil with no human face or agency. Although most Americans are aware that en masse, those responsible for sexual violence are men, the discussion on rape is somewhat one-sided. Like racists, the perpetrators of sexual violence are forced outside of the conceptual limits of modern society, far enough away for us to act as if they aren't there. Once again, we create a situation where discourse can't be established, thus, less progress is attained. On a lighter note, something refreshing about this talk is the approach that it takes to change the status quo of a culture that often normalizes harmful behaviors, objectifies women, and sustains sexual violence. In clarifying that these behaviors are an issue of concern for both women and men, he begins to bridge the gap in a discourse on gender and sexual violence that has been predominantly occupied by women. Along with Adichie's insights in Americanah, this speech promotes something integral to progress, that is, honesty. Its about twelve minutes long, but I recommend giving it a view, as it provides concrete data on the prevalence of sexual violence today. |
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