media essay 5-6 pages due 12 hours
fanbing910724
Lecture72283F_17.pptxAgenda 10/24.17
Announcements
The Ladies and Music
Quiz #1
Next Week
Hispanics and Latin Americans in Canada
“Latin America is the fourth-largest source of immigration to Canada”
Professional wave began in 1990s
Between 600,00-1.2 million in Canada
28% in Toronto
11,000 Latinos in London
Hispanics are five years younger and more likely to be university-educated than other Canadians.
“…almost 50 per cent of Hispanic Canadians have at least a bachelor’s degree; another 12 per cent have a non-university diploma.”
*http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/targeting-canadas-invisible-hispanic-community/article554684/
Hispanics and Latina/os in U.S.
54 million in U.S. (17% of U.S. total population)
Largest “ethnic” group
64% are of Mexican heritage
23% of Californians are of Mexican heritage
Concepts
Hypersexuality: (Celine Parrenas Shimizu)
“a form of bondage that ties the subjectivity of Asian/American women”
“vibrant combination of fantasy and reality”
can be a “productive perversity or critique of the power of normalcy”
White gaze:
“‘the power of whites to control or contain constructions of nonwhite ethnicity in US popular culture.’” (Molina-Guzman 65)
Latinas and Popular Culture
Latinas and Popular Culture
The “help”
“Brown” lady (racial flexibility and ethnic ambiguity)
“Hot” (sensuality and temperament)
Commodification of Latina panethnicity
Associations with different Latino
communities
Approximation to blackness
Approximation to whiteness
Latinas and Popular Culture
Representations of Latina booty/body
Innate sexuality
Relationship with the hypersexualization of Latinas
Sexualization of race and ethnicity
Representation as colonialization
Relationship with blackness
“…Latina bodies as historically contingent artifacts are informed by specific social and political contexts” (Molina-Guzmán 83)
Jennifer Lopez
Nuyorican
In Living Color back-up dancer
J. Lo. album and Wedding Planner film (2001)
3rd woman to have #1
album and film in the same
week
American Idol judge
Television star
Booty before her face
Jennifer Lopez
“Similarly Lopez entered the lucrative stream of global popular culture as a docile, exotic, desirable, commodifiable body, yet she was forbidden to partake in the full rights and economic privileges of whiteness” (Molina-Guzmán 85)
“…ethnic women function in symbolically important ways as constitutive of national identity discourses. The cultural status of Latinas is always mediated by the project of U.S. empire-building” (Molina-Guzmán 86)
Jennifer Lopiz
J Lo, hypersexualization and ethnoracial identity and ambiguity
White gaze
Colonized media depictions
Culturally dangerous
Jennifer Lopez and Popular Culture
Who is the target audience? Women? Men? Both?
How is pleasure visualized and verbally expressed in the videos?
Are there racialized dynamics in the videos?
Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny from the Block”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dly6p4Fu5TE
Jennifer Lopez’s “Booty,” featuring Iggy Azalea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxtIRArhVD4
Themes
Power
Control
Objectification
Exoticization
Desire
Transformation
Nicki Minaj
Onika Tanya Maraj
Born in Trinidad; raised in Queens
Independent underground rapper
Pink Friday (2010)
Femmecee
Not a “Righteous Queen”*
Not a “Gangsta Boo”*
Not a non-gendered or nonsexual female rapper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOlvNyseYTY
Shange
Butler and femmehood
“to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of the repetition of a law that is not its consolidation, but its replacement” (Butler 1990, 40).
Do you agree with Butler’s argument?
How would Nicki Minaj represent Butler’s argument?
Shange
Shange on Minaj
“Thus, I argue that Nicki’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform “straight” or “queer,” but upon closer examination, she refuses both. It is this refusal of legibility, of any parochial rendition of black sexuality, that fuels derisive dismissals of Nicki’s black femme subjectivity…” (30).
Shange
Strategic queerness
“is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in the service of a subject’s material, political, erotic, or discursive interest(s)” (31).
Homonationalism
“queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” (Jasbir Puar 2005: 122)
Shange
Homonormativity
legitimate “queer” sexuality and identity (white, middle-class, nuclear, “good”)
Homonorms in nondominant queer communities
Butch, stud, and femme sociality
Organizes desire
Regulates “selves” (identities)
Shange
Nicki Minaj, strategic queerness (defies homonormativity), and disarticulation
Disentangles femme from femme (female/feminine)/ butch (male/masculine) dichotomy
Possibilities of black
femme-ness
Her “kingliness”
Phallic imagery
Shange
Do these videos reenact and replace scripts about gender roles and sexual belonging?
What provocative images are used in the images? What do they convey?
“Beez In The Trap”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmZvOhHF85I
“Anaconda” video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs
Nicki Minaj’s ABC interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3eTsCaRQg
Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda
“Nicki Minaj is the current walking embodiment of that tradition of stereotype enabled victim-blaming, proving that as a society, America has yet to defeat its racist notions and will even continue to invoke them to the economic and social benefit of the Whiter man. This implicates Nicki Minaj and her brand in an unforgivable way. As the face of the modern perpetuation of a stereotype created to serve and justify White male dominance, Minaj and her multi-million dollar empire represents everything wrong with our current perception of blackness and more specifically, Black female sexuality.” (Tiffanie Drayton)
Drayton
Anaconda
Themes
Power
Control
Racialization
Desire
Subversion
Tove Lo
Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson
Swedish
Songwriter for Icona Pop,
Ellie Goulding, and Hilary Duff(!)
Truth Serum (2014)
Lady Wood (2016)
"Sweden's darkest pop export"
"the saddest girl in Sweden”
a “hard-drinking, hard-drugging, DTF party girl”? A dirtier Taylor Swift?”
Tove Lo
“For me it’s always been a very sure thing that I am a feminist,” she goes on. “In Sweden, we have a ways to go, but it’s almost shameful to say you’re not. But here it seems like a very loaded thing to say. Like in interviews, they say drops her voice to a serious register]: ‘Would you say that you are a feminist?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And they’re like, ‘Ohhh.’ So,” she shrugs, “I guess I’m just going to scream it from the rooftops now.” (Pressler article)
“Well, Lady Wood is an expression that means the female hard-on,” she tells us in a very matter-of-fact way when we ask why. “And that feels right because this album is really all about chasing rushes – whether that’s a sexual rush, the rush you get from drugs, or from falling in love, or whatever. And also, when a woman is strong or brave or has a lot of opinions, people will often say she ‘has balls’ , but I never really liked that [expression]. So maybe Lady Wood can be a new way of saying ‘a chick who has balls’.” (Levine article)
Tove Lo
How is sexual desire expressed? With confidence? As natural?
Does the fact that Tove Lo is white affect how her videos could be perceived?
Habits (Stay High) and Cool Girl (Part of Fairy Dust)
https://www.vevo.com/watch/tove-lo/habits-(stay-high)-hippie-sabotage-remix/SEUV71400050
http://www.vevo.com/watch/tove-lo/Cool-Girl-(Part-of-Fairy-Dust)/SEUV71600146
Tove Lo
Themes
Pleasure
Ownership
Responsibility
Desire
Emotion
Quiz!
Next Week
Gould
Nash and Grant
Nijhawan
