Thesis Thesis Midterm Exam Study Guide Representation Meaning and Language Stuart Hall The way we think about culture and Meaning Culture is a shared conceptual maps shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them Meaning is never something fixed or in nature but is constructed and produced by our social cultural and linguistic conventions Can a meaning be fixed No A film is not an accurate representation of reality Hegemony James Lull It requires that ideological assertions become self evident cultural assertions Ideology and logical state apparatuses Slide 11 Social Control is fragile It requires renewal and modification through assentation and reassertion of power There s no pressure doing things for yourself control is fragile because life is self regulated Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Everything revolves around the power of labor Who decides these rules The school has replaced the church for morality ISA A certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized instructions r SA the government the administration the army the police the prisons Disney Gender Roles Never are both the male and female characters strong Cultivation Theory slide 4 It argues that children s media helps children develop concepts regarding social behavior and norms ie kids will see how other kids act on tv and mimic the behavior believing it to be normal Gender in media will no doubt influence children s behavior identity and beliefs about what is normative Aesthetics Film Noir Somewhere in the night Shadow low key lighting The physical aspects that make a film darker Distorting focus cinematography Distorting wide angle lenses Sequence shots Sequence shots Disorienting wide angle lenses Disorienting mise en scene Jarring juxtapositions between shots involving extreme changes in camera angle or screen size Claustrophobic framing Romantic voiceover narration Flashbacks convoluted temporal sequencing of events Spider Women Women in Film Noir Dress defines the women Long hair make up and jewelry Nature is fundamentally Sexual Dominance on camera male s gaze audience s gaze moves with the Cigarettes immortal sensuality Long lovely legs viewpoint of male who is to be seduced spider woman Sexual aggressive Goal of Independence o Expressed by self absorbed narcissism o Self interest rather than devotion Femme Fatales Femme Fatales are greatly exaggerated Men Masculinity and Manhood Acts Intro women Manhood Acts Masculinity is a collective male practice and its attempt to subordinate The male psyche of the male soldier must be reshaped to repress the feminine to transform him into a ruthless unemotional fighting machine Because you have the same organs you re supposed to act a certain way Claiming privilege eliciting difference and resisting exploitation Conceptions and Contraception s of the future Kill machines and creation because they weren t created through Birth control and abortion is bad and seen as a threat referring to Main Points heterosexual intercourse heterosexual reproduction destruction We ll have to kill our own babies or kill what we created to prevent our own Homosociality and Maintaining Hegemonic Bird Nonsexual attractions held by men or women for members of their own The point is to get you to not question why you are behaving in a Homosociality sex particular way Hegemonic Masculinity Constructed to subordinate women Institutionalized men s dominance over women and other men Components of Masculinity Emotional Detachment Competitiveness o Separate can t be equal Sexual Objectification of women Sci fi Horror o Turning women into objects meant for sexual pleasure There s a threat of the other or the unknown not of this world Discovery of who we are and what it means to be human Search for knowledge Themes of Horror Horror and Fiction Film Themes of Science Fiction Threat of the other usually revolves around sex outside of marriage An attack on the modern family American family Finding the threat and destroying it o This separates horror from sci fi Came out of the cold war Sci fi is about the breakdown of democracy Exploration research and collecting data What it means to be human those that are not human think they re human Theme What it means to be human as those who exist in a liminal state Theme Search for knowledge Both genres explore boundaries between humans and nonhumans as well Horror locating the threat and or way to destroy it Science Fiction similar to the scientific method collecting data research experimentation Theme Self and other Horror the other is a product of our nightmares minds Science Fiction the other is a product of science and technology Race Racial Formation in the US 1960 s 1990 s Race is a social construct
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