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reading reflection #10

Tron was Disney’s attempt to become relevant again after suffering some hard times. The movie targeted at a teenage audience pretty much flopped and is only really remembered by the arcade game that came from it. Tron does not fail to represent whiteness and traditional gender norms despite being mostly set inside a computer. Tron displays xenophobic ideologies through a fear of mixing with the “other”, and the lack of non-white characters is suspect at best. Overall the film does little to be an iconic Disney film, while still showing a division of good and evil based on colors and using whiteness as the standard. Wall-E takes a turn from the usual nature documentary to show humans as the agent in earth’s downfall. The tiny robot takes the viewer through a deep plot that makes you fall in love with him while also realizing what humans can do to the earth. Wall-E is an interesting male lead because he has a sort of ‘womb’, he uses it to clean up the earth and the womb that humans destroyed. The movie moves away from the crumble of humanity and instead tries to show hope for the human race if we do something to change. Up demonstrates a lot of hard issues in a children’s film, leading many to argue whether it’s just for children. The film calls into question what a family is, showing that it can be just a group of people who care about each other. Disney has found a formula to good animation, having  films obey laws of physics, but still with a certain amount of exaggeration that you don’t get in real life. Up is a good example of Pixar making movies with heart, so that kids can enjoy it and adults can appreciate the deeper messages with the artistic animation.

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Reading reflection #9

Models of Disability talked about how it is hard to quantify the numbers of people with disabilities because the type and effect of a disability changes, but so can whether or not someone has a disability for the long term. disability and ability are hard to quantify because disabilities do not have fixed qualities. A lot of anxiety comes with disabilities because they are often associated with failure. There are social and medical models for disabilities, but both are criticized. Ten Principles of Disability Justice offers a way to look at disability with room for movement. The ten principles are: intersectionality, leadership of those impacted, anti-capitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, cross disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation. Disability media participation talks about how many more people have disabilities than you would expect. There has finally been a shift to representing these people in media that hasn’t been there before. Disability in media is very easily politicized, but the best outlet to avoid this is hearing directly from those who are disabled through blogs and other forms of media. The best way to give these people a voice is to listen to their own, not to make up stories for them.  

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Reading reflection #8

This section covered sexual orientation throughout US history. The berdache were members of Native American tribes who were biologically male, but had feminine behaviors. They were highly respected among their tribes until Europeans took it upon themselves to eliminate them. White people ruin everything. Lesbian relationships in the middle and owning classes were seen as more ok since women were still typically “ladylike”, but working class women were degraded. Women in the working class who cross dressed or had more masculine traits were seen as something other than women. Gradually, lesbianism was actually constructed and the idea of homosexual relationships was established. The US was able to turn a blind eye to homosexuality during times of war since work was needed, so people had to put aside their issues with homosexuality. After WWII, attitudes toward same sex relationships turned to try to “cure” them. People assumed to be gay were fired even without any real proof. LGBTQ people were targeted for raids and have been put to blame for issues such as AIDS still today. We as a country have become more accepting, but these people are still facing discrimination. 

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Reading reflection 7

This section talked about African American influence and representation in media, and mostly in music. It talked a lot about how black artists gain popularity by having a “black sound”. Although I believe there has been some movement away from using race to identify music, you still hear people describe black artists, whether they rap or sing, as “urban”, which is essentially the same as a “black sounding” genre. This section also brought up the issues in hip-hop regarding misogyny. Many people opposed to rap music bring up misogynistic lyrics, yet ignore their roots in civil rights and art. Music that is associated with black communities is very quickly written off as something not to be taken seriously or appreciated.

This disney section talked about how whiteness and white narratives are favored in disney films. They typically ignore the other side of the story. The only place you get a glimpse of anything less than vanilla valley is as a sidekick to the main character. 

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Reading reflection 6

This section of Media Messages covered the roles and representation of Latinx in media. It talked about how initially racism wasn’t seen so much in the film industry, until discrimination against people of color became profitable. This is an interesting concept to me because racism in any aspect has seemed to been there from the start, so seeing that there was a point where people of color were represented without much issue is interesting. The book brought up how there are very few roles for Latinx people, and the ones that are there are essentially reinforcing the same stereotypes over and over. This made me realize how few Latinx people I see in movies, and they’re usually hypersexualized, exotic people that have a whole lot of gang connections. 

This section of Diversity in Disney talked about Asian representation. It talked about how orientalism seen in disney reinforces the idea of anything other than western as outsiders. Disney used Asians and Asian culture to represent something strange or bad. The most obvious example of this is the Siamese cats in lady and the tramp, who are given lyrics that accentuate their oriental heritage, while also placing them in the story as evil. 

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reading reflection #5

This section of Media Messaged talked about race beyond the media, but how we experience race in everyday life. It talked about how even well-intentioned schools , neighborhoods, and groups of people might try to desegregate, there is still a lot of segregation. There were two personal stories about a Jewish woman and an African American man. They both lived in neighborhoods with people who were like them. There was very much a ‘them’ and ‘us’ in their stories. This section showed how desegregation has many levels to it. It’s not as simple as a mixed-race neighborhood, you have to address schools too. On a very basic level, race is just genetic information that affects the production of melanin, but in society race is so much more complicated than that. The Jewish woman talked about how many young Jewish girls were getting plastic surgery to ‘fix’ their noses and look more like the European girls. This to me shows that there is a desire among minority groups to conform to white beauty standards.

This section of Disney talked about blackness and Latinx representation in Disney. The overall message is that Disney uses long lists of stereotypes for characters of African and Latin descent. These stereotypes are dramatic characterizations used to portray people of color as the bad guys, or as something worth laughing at. People of color haven’t really been represented in a way that doesn’t put them in a negative light. 

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Reading Reflection 4

This section covered class and media. It brought my attention to the fact that a lot of TV and popular media focuses around people of higher economic class, while leaving lower class characters as a minority, and sometimes using them as a joke. The financial class can be broken down even more by the depiction of those who are middle to upper class. Most of these characters are white and are modeled to be the ideal persona. They represent societal values and expectations. This means that there is an under representation of lower income people, and those who are not white. Media has rarely focused on characters of color beyond using them as comedic relief, however The Cosby Show started moving in the right direction. Popular film tends to glorify romantic and family-centered stories. There’s always a white girl falling in love with a white guy and having white kids together. And they just so happen to not struggle financially. The message that I got from this section is that there is a huge lack of diversity in class representation and even in who represents the classes. 

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Reading Reflection 3

This section for Diversity in Disney discussed Timone and Bumbaa from the Lion King. The main focus was how these two characters were the first homosexual cartoon characters. Although, their sexuality was never explicitly stated in the movie. What made them ‘gay was the fast that they are two male characters raising a child together and have many stereotypical behaviors expected of someone who is gay. They provide comic relief from the heavy context of the movie, they sing show tunes, they dress in drag, and they seem to represent more of a persona than actual character with more than surface-deep personalities. Of course many people were outraged by their ‘gayness’ as if the movie was pushing an agenda onto the kids viewing the movie. The overall message that I got was Timone and Pumbaa were more symbols for something than actual complex beings like the other characters, and it was their queer characteristics that gave them this lack of depth. 

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reading reflection #2

The section covered in Media Messages talked about gender socialization. The main point I got out of it is that from birth, most of us are raised to exhibit either femininity or masculinity. There are two ends of the spectrum and no real grey area. We are socialized to believe that this is how men and women are supposed to act. It gets reinforced by the media in ways like having the min character of a book be the adventurous, strong male, and the women are the meek side characters. I was raised to be very feminine, but the reality is that most people fall in a more grey area: I like things that are both masculine and feminine. We are raised to believe that we are one thing or the other, but that is never really true, people are much more complex than that just by nature.

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Reading Reflection #1

This section of the text explained that we get our information through three sources: popular media, formal/academic learning, and personal experiences. These three avenues of accumulating information help us to form our own “truths”. We form our ideas of what is assumed to be normal or abnormal based on our personal experiences. The book uses christmas as an example of this, because in the US it is the norm to celebrate christmas. Most holiday themed movies, music, or other media is actually just christmas themed. Most people grow up uni-culturally, meaning that they are surrounded by those with the same race, economic class, and beliefs as each other. This leads us to form our opinion of what is the “right way” based on what our specific culture tells us is such. We learn cultural norms and values based off of people or sources that we know, love, and trust giving us information, or misinformation. The process of reconstructing our own misinformation requires an open mind. The book introduces six theories of socialization that will be used to help us reconstruct our own knowledge: The first of which is the social cognitive theory, which explains that we learn behaviors from observing them and seeing them be rewarded continuously. The social self theory builds off of this to say that our identity consists of of self-awareness, interactions with others, and our ability to to understand and respond to others. Liberation theory suggests that everyone is born with innate qualities of brilliance and an infinite capacity for happiness and success; behaviors can therefore be learned and unlearned by any individual. Cultural competence theory states that society will be better f we can understand and respect each other’s cultures. The fabric of oppression theory explains how our cultural and social groups impact our ability to access things that we need to reach our goals. Lastly, the cycle of socialization theory states that we learn our culture’s norms by learning things from people that we know and trust.