Overall feelings right after IO:

I am proud of how I have done in my oral. I think in the future I need to work on comparing the intertextuality between the texts as I forgot to in the oral, although Vicky helped me by asking me a question about it. I think when preparing for the oral I focused too much on second guessing myself and the extracts and my ideas, and more on practicing saying my ideas out loud. I was not confident enough in my opinions so during the oral I kept getting lost in my thoughts.

What I think I did well:

• The structure of my IO was very organised and well thought out. It ensured that my ideas weren’t getting lost which helped make the message more clear
• I think I did well in answering the follow up questions – something that I think comes with lots of research into the text and enough fluency to be capable of going past what I prepared.

Improvements:

• I need to work on creating a thesis after gathering evidence because when I force evidence to work with my thesis, the evidence was weaker and felt like a stretch in supporting my thesis. By doing it the other way around I can eliminate this problem.
• I need to work on getting evidence that can be seen throughout the text and not just the extract.
• I need to practice my oral more next time because I tended to loose my train of thought under pressure. I also need to stop referring to my notes as much which will also come with more practice.
• Make sure both texts were evenly spoken about

Takeaways that will threaten my IO (what I need to focus on avoiding):

• Finding thesis first and then finding evidence to prove my thesis prevents me from using quality evidence.
• Comic books as a literary piece is not a strong point of discussion because it can force the focus on visual aspects – and the visual elements of comic books tend to be very basic and simply designed making it harder to go into a deep analysis.
• Over complicating my global issue takes away time from my explanations and my analysis.

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The Like a Girl campaign aims to raise awareness about womens capability and equality by changing the mindset in Western culture that women are less capable than men. The obvious audience for this campaign would be men, however the campaign also highlights the issue of women too thinking lesser of themselves as a result of being told how they should be and conforming into these stereotypes, and therefore the audience of this campaign is not only men but also women. It is clear to see that the campaign is not contributing to this sexist culture, rather redefine what women think of themself and how they should ‘traditionally’ act. However minor aspects of this ad help reveal how truly integrated this culture is in us, by missing out on details demonstrating the exact opposite of what the campaigns message is.

A visual element of the campaign proving how women are being conformed to what society expects of them is how the girls interviewed appear. The older girl is very dolled up, she has her hair and makeup done and is wearing heels. She is also wearing American flag on her jeans, portraying the image of a perfect American girl. Although the younger girl appears to be wearing sportier clothes, she still has her hair done-  implying that “You can still play sports but u need to look pretty because you are a girl.” An overall message of these two girls is that after puberty, girls conform to what culture expects of them.

Another two unintentional visual elements of the campaign show how truly integrated this culture is in our lives. In a shot of the director of the campaign, the clear message would be that she is in charge and empowered, however because of the angle it has been shot in, it looks as if she is being overcrowded and pushed into a corner by two men. In another shot of the campaign filming interviewed women, the women are clearly meant to be the focal point, they are the centre of the implied message by the author, however once again in the angle its being filmed, a camera man is visible. He is closer to the camera making him appear bigger and therefore the implied message is that the man is more important. In both these shots, the women are supposed to be the centre of focus, however both are being overshadowed by men.

The Like a Girl campaign focuses on raising awareness on Western culture and how this can effect womens identity. This campaign doesn’t intentionally contribute to this culture and actually tries to promote the opposite, however falls short in missing details demonstrating how apparent this issue is. A sad reality this poses is that because this culture is so apparent in our daily lives, that even when trying to promote change, we aren’t even able to see so many things playing into our societal beliefs – because it has been so normalised to us.

Quote: “A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.”

Question: To what extent are Ibsen’s words still true today? 

I think that Ibsen was very much ahead of his time when looking upon society and acknowledging the problem with gender equality years before the ideas of equality surfaced. Only recently has the ideas of gender equality been viewed as an actual issue and being advocated for. Men dominating all parts of society, even issues only concerning women is still very apparent today in 2018. For example, in the United States there has recently been a very heated debate about abortion, ironically is isn’t the women who are trying to criminalise abortion, the majority is men. The problem with this is that men are trying to dictate a women decision, because its easy for them to say that abortions are bad and no one should have them because they never have the imagine themselves in that situation. Just like Ibsen said, laws are trying to be framed by men and judging something that is only a woman’s problem.

I can identify several examples of how a particular foundational story has been retold , adapted, revisioned and alluded to.

In Janssen’s presentation on the Chinese Zodiacs, he has talked about the stories modern day relevance. The story has not been adapted too much, and remains very much the same as it was originally told. However many children books and Tv shows do retell the story. It was originally a myth in Chinese culture but now is more often just a children’s story.

I can trace the changing significance of a particular story over time and across cultures. 

There was not much information about the stories changing significance across different cultures, but its presumably because it is a culture specific story, as in only in Chinese culture and so there is no changing significance for this story in any other cultures. However the stories significance has changed throughout time in Chinese culture, it firstly was a myth in Chinese culture that was truly believed but over time has just become a story told to children.

How has the story been adapted over time and why?

The presentation didn’t exactly explain how it has been adapted over time, so I’m not exactly sure if it has or not. I would assume that because the story is now mostly only being told as a child story, that it has been lessened down to be less complex for children to comprehend.