This is the blog for the second week. We started to look at the issue of gender roles in the current society.
The class started with a video Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne. It is a very educational lecture that talked about how advertisements bring bad influence to women and girls and their gender roles. The lecture is very detailed, logical, and persuasive and because of that, I was able to make some meaningful annotations. The next thing I read is an article "Looking into the Magic Mirror: Disney’s Impact on the Fairy Tale Genre" written by my professor and her colleague. And my task is to ask questions, make connections and annotations etc.. The article is very informative and interesting to read for me as half of a Disney fan. I learned a lot about fairy tale itself and its relationship with gender roles. I had a short practice of how to integrate source into my writing, which I think I did well. Lastly, this week's exploratory writing assignment, asked us to write four paragraphs about 2 topic in the video and 2 topic in the article.
After this week of learning, I begin to understand the purposes of studying gender roles. Killing Us Softly 4 contains a lot of pictures of advertisements, something I really need to see because after my family has never set up a TV channel in U.S., so I haven't got a chance to watch some general advertisements. (YouTube choose ads based on the topic users are interested in, and apparently gender role is not one of them) After watching them, I quickly understand the distortion Jean Kilbourne was talking about and why it happens. Before I did the reading on "Looking into the Magic Mirror: Disney’s Impact on the Fairy Tale Genre", I already knew that Disney's role of princesses are highly related to feminism, but the idea of what is a fairy tale genre and its key elements is a completely new knowledge to me. I very much liked the section where I need to connect myself with the article, in the annotation and exploratory writing. It allows me to think back about my own experiences, and how it's related the issues this class is discussing. This process really helped me develop a way to identify and interpret the issue.
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