In this week's Language and Gender class, we were doing media analysis by groups. Our task is to identify language and gender issue in different channels of media. Each of the group has made a poster around the topic. The class was so much fun and I felt it's worth sharing what we did with all of you.
Our group did an analysis on the popular TV series How I Met Your Mother. The show was very hilarious and there are many elements that are very interesting. For example, there are a lot of humor in this show about "sex" and "non-conventional gender behavior". For example, Ted Mosby, who is a male character in the show, is however very "feminine" in his behavior and thoughts about relationship and life. In contrast, Robin Scherbatsky, who is the female character in the show, and was brought up by her dad as a boy because her dad prefers son to daughter. That's why she has a very "masculine" personality, for example she likes shooting gun, hockey, and cigar. The contradictory between Ted and Robin makes the show very funny, and it is contradictory to what we conventionally think about genders. However, is this anti-convention really create new gender categories or essentializing the binary gender system? That's a question that we need to think about the media today.
Another group did an analysis on the Disney Princess series, which has all these "princess" figures together. They have done a survey about how people think about these princess and what characteristics should a princess/female role model should have.
This group has focused on an ad campaign of Special K's "What do you gain when you lose?" There are a lot of creative gender issue going on and throughout the time there are certain dimension of gender that has changed and has not changed. It's very interesting to see this campaign as a breakthrough but somehow the underlying ideology about gender is still binary.
These are done by a group of Chinese students. They compared how big international brands translate their names into Chinese and how the choice of the characters affect the gender ideology. There are several interesting examples like Maybelline, in Chinese it's 美宝莲, where 美 means beautiful, specifically to describe women, 宝 means precious and 莲 means lotus, which is an indication of purity in Chinese and it's usually related to girls.
The last group did an analysis around a movie Gran Torino, where a very typical male image is constructed. There are many interesting discourse in the movie that has conveyed gender ideology in it.
The media analysis was really thought-provoking because we really went deep into those topics in the modern media today and there can be so many controversial things about language and gender going on.