Race, Gender, and S ocial C lass How are they connected and how has it evolved over time?

1. Race, Gender, and Social ClassHow are they connectedand how has it evolved over time? Savanna Dakhil

2. Representation of Gender, Race, and Class Q: What contribute to or undermines the inequalities that exist in our society? A: Social Construct. Q: What is Social Construct and how is it created? A: It is the social, economic, and political forces that shape and reshape these conceptual categories over time and place, and we find it in our media.

3. Gender • Our gender attributes begin at birth and are created through socialization. • We must recognize that a given cultures idea of the “perfect woman” or “real man” can shift dramatically in response to changing economic and social conditions. • Mary Roger’s chapter titled “Hetero Barbie?” Suggests that gender has acquired a whole new range of association in light of the queer theory that has grown out of both activist politics and postmodern scholarship over recent years (pg 68).

4. Queer theorist Judith Butler has linked gender to a theoretical performance – a matter of gradually learned role-playing, with no necessary correlation to one’s biological sex (pg 68). For example: VS. (pink/dolls/girl) (Blue/ tools/ boy) Children's toy advertisements in the media are gender specific. Teaching adolescence at a young age the role they play in our society based on their biological sex. Who says it needs to be one way or the other?

5. What is Queer Theory? • Draws upon the work of historians of gender and sexuality, who have pointed out that the very idea of fixed and opposite sexual orientations, “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” are only a century old (pg 68). • It has given us a new century unsettling, but also exciting and potentially liberating way of thinking about representations of gender and sexuality in popular culture (pg 28).

6. Queer theory perspective in the media HBO series Sex and the City • The show which follows the heterosexual adventures of four single women Living in NYC in the first decade of he 21stcentury, can also be viewed as subversive, to a degree, of normative heterosexuality and femininity.

7. Jane Gerhard, author of the article “Sex and the City: Carrie Bradshaw’s Queer post feminism” said, “The challenging friendships pose to the women's heterosexual identities is not that such friendships mark them as gay. Rather, the connections they have with each other create an alternative to their boyfriends, and alternative to that, by its very existence, grants the women options different from those traditionally signified as “heterosexual” (where women satisfy their desires with one man, serially or monogamously” (pg 77).

8. Race • Although the political importance of “race” as a social category is evident in today's society, most scholars agree that “race” is a convenient fiction with complex historical significance but no biological reality (pg. 630). • In out society today, racism can be used to mean holding prejudiced or bigoted attitudes or indulging in discriminatory behavior towards someone else, on the basis of that persons apparent race, ethnicity, or skin color (pg 630).

9. In Stuart hall’s article “ The whites of Their Eye: Racist ideologies and the Media” he claims that racism and the media’ touches directly the problem of ideology, since the medias main sphere of operation is the production and transformation of ideologies (pg 81). Ideologies: images, concepts and premises, which provide the framework through which we represent, interpret, understand and ‘make sense’ of some aspect of social existence (pg 81).

10. On assumption about race that has historical resonance in U.S media representations is that African Americas in particular are hypersexual. This imputed hyper sexuality has played a part in the creation of “otherness” and has had a historically legitimized acts of violence such as the rape of Black women and the lynching of Black men. Other Race ideologies portrayed in the media (Youtube videos)… - South park has many episode that includes rascism. Thisparticular clip is poking fun at Chinese people South Park - The show Scrubs attempts to meld many races and modern interracial concerns into one comedy-drama. This clip is a good example of the light-hearted look the show takes at the daily minefield of racial sensitivity we all traverse also poking fun at Asians. Scrubs

11. - Volkswagen features an Arab terrorist in its ad campaign for the new Polo automobile. The terrorist attempts to be a suicide bomber at the scene of a busy restaurant, but his plan is thwarted because the Polo, despite being small, is just too strong for his bomb. VW Terrorist - This Kool-Aid ad offended many with the stereotypical hip-hop basketball-court vignette. Kool Aid is often referred to as “ghetto juice” and this ad played into the slur. Racist Kool-Aid Commercial

12. Jennifer Esposito’s study of the television workplace comedy Ugly Betty shows how race still structures our lives “This show features a highly nontraditional heroine: a brown-skinned girl wearing braces and glasses working for a boss who is an irresponsible sex addict. While the show does try to satirize stereotypes of race, gender, class and sexuality, it nonetheless contributes to the reinscription of some stereotypes” (pg 96).

13. Social Class • Television representation of social class contributes to maintaining the social and political status quo, by failing to question the hegemonic discourse of meritocracy (pg 70). • Richard Butsch shows in his study on television representation of the male working class buffon, viewers are offered the idea that lower class in not succeeding in becoming rich because they are laughably stupid, rather than because they confront an economic and educational structure that limits class mobility (pg 70).

14. Butsch’s study shows shows a political economy perspective on how business of television program production can create a kinf of inertia that makes changing such long-lasting stereotypes difficult (pg 70),

15. The Show modern family on ABC is your stereotypical Middle Class working family. They family is very diverse, lives in a suburban neighborhood, drive a mini van. They all have typical family arguments and issues about boys, school, and work.

16. The show revenge on ABS is your stereotypical upper class family. They are all wealthy, live in mansions in the Hamptons. The families use their wealth for power. The families lie, steal and manipulate one another to get what they want.