"Politics of Difference"

I thought I would start off this new blog with a little bit of an introduction to the subject matter. I will be writing about media's role in portraying culture and identity in our society, with a heavy emphasis on race, gender, and class. Images and texts in our media convey a certain message about who we are, and here I will be examining that information and critiquing it with a "cultural studies" focus. In Chris Barker's book Culture and Cultural Studies, he discusses questions of race and gender (which will be significant themes in this blog) that I will later apply to media criticism later on. About feminism he states that the "subordination of women is argued to be evident across a range of social institutions and practices, that is, male power and female subordination are structural". I think our mass media is definitely one of those institutions that uphold female subordination. As an example, here is an advertisement for Skyy Vodka that I think is an obvious visual portrayal of male domination in our society:
(http://www.usask.ca/art/a31701/site/britski/alcohol.html) Not only is the woman a sexualized object, but there is a domineering man literally standing over her, "keeping her down".

Another topic I want to introduce in this blog is racism, another commonly portrayed cultural practice in our media. How about this ad for Intel: (http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2007-08-10-IntelRacistAd.jpg) The bowing down of the African atheletes to the professional white male is a blatant representation of the racism embedded in our society. This is a serious problem if Barker's claims that "races do not exist outside of representation but are formed in and by it in a process of social and political power struggle".

Later on, I will be dealing with more specific issues of identity and our mass media, but this has just been a sampling of what the blog will be discussing.