Author: srira11440@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg

our truth

ourtruth2

Unit Overview

The unit of representation was one that explored basically any possible text. I remember we started of the year looking at how Asians were portrayed in ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and the risks of publishing works in regards to an ethnicity or sector of society that you are not. And a key concept that came out was that of our habit to stereotype. We place large groups of people into certain categories in order to believe we understand them, however we neglect the differences at an individual level. Further from that whether as an author, you have the responsibility for the messages that your text portrays. Just as how each person behaves individually, each person will also interpret a text in their own way meaning that it is quite unpredictable as to who you could offend. However, if that is the case, then no one would ever write books on anything but personal experiences meaning that some of the best texts would not have come to existence. The question of representation also gives us a huge insight into the development and stance of a society. It can reveal hidden ideals in regards to race, gender, religion and other social constructs.

Advertising

We started out by looking at how advertising in the media represents people, especially in regards to the depiction of women. Through this we started learning about all the techniques that are used in advertising and how creators utilise them to send a message. Here is an ad analysis I did:

We then moved on into looking at our first body of work as a class, a series of modified advertisements published by the author Saint Hoax to shed light upon the misogyny that exists in America. We used ads from his collection “Making America Mysoginistic Again” and tried to see what key ideas we could extract. A large takeaway I had from that is that in the mid 1900s of America, although the average middle class white woman wasn’t as oppressed as others, she was required to set her ambitions aside to conform to societies norm. I had never quite considered what a large part gender roles had played.

We then moved on to looking at video advertisements, such as the ads done by tide at the superbowl. We began to explore the idea of cliches, repetitive ideas that people use to represent a certain situation. Tide basically took cliches, and mocked them, which made tide seem like a brand that stood out. More so than this, they created ad battles in which they would decide what day was the day to do laundry. This brought in the concept that even controversy can be helpful. Whether it gains viewers or helps a society progress, controversy can be quite beneficial. Cliche stills I explored:

Poetry

From here we moved on to poetry, going straight into our body of work, ‘A World’s Wife’ by Carol Ann Duffy. The purpose of that collection was also to shed light upon the prevalence of sexism in our society. This allowed us to start exploring poetic techniques as well to see how a poet achieves conveying their same values but with different methods to an advertisement. The poems we studied often featured more dark and controversial themes, which also helped us explore why several aspects of being a woman such as sex and breastfeeding is considered taboo in society. We were able to understand that by the oppression of a social sector, there was a misrepresentation of them because no one could properly empathise. My analysis of the poem ‘Medusa’:

Individual Oral

From here, we started to pair our literary and non literary texts to see how messages were conveyed across them both. We started off by merely having discussions in pairs, to moving onto recording individual videos. We began by picking any ad and any poem and trying to see what similarities we could draw between them pertaining to the concept of gender discrimination. Some of my initial work:

I was very happy about the opportunity to articulate my thoughts further and understand how micro elements of a text link to wider global issues. I noticed that under an overarching ideas were so many subsets of possible issues to explore and I was really pleased that I developed my thinking further. For the IO that we did recently, I chose a Carol Ann Duffy poem and paired it with a Saint Hoax ad, which allowed me to elaborate more on what we had already studied in class. One theme that really shined through was that of suppressing one’s emotions. Unfortunately, many women are brought up believing they cannot express themselves and continue to feed into this stigma.

Journalism

We then started looking at a new text type: Articles. This pertained so much to our class because we all get our information from online article sources, and we live in a world troubled by current affairs. To me, this really allowed to explore the information, explicit and subtle, that we are receiving. We focused mainly on looking at bias in terms of how people are represented. Based on which side of the story you are on, you will represent the opposition based on your personal experiences. Sometimes we are completely oblivious to the bias that we are being fed. We started learning the technique of visual and lexical bias that is employed by almost all journalism outlet. I really began to think about how every story has two sides and based on where you stand, that is how you will represent the other side, while once again neglecting personal context. In order to understand bias, we completed an activity of taking a photo and creating an ‘article’ around it that presented some form of bias:

Connection to next unit

I think the theme of current affairs is a perfect transition to our new unit of ‘Troubled Worlds: Change and Conflict’. We see this most in the political and physical world, which is always recorded through journalism.

To begin with, we read “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. This dystopian tale really made me question about how the morals of society are ever-changing because there will always be those that make a stand. 100 years ago now one would have imagined that women would have freedom and rights, but thanks to many who fought against it, society morphed. Many journalists take the brunt of this work by exposing the faults and flaws in society, even to the expense of losing their life because they found out too much and shared it for the sake of society. NLMG also made me think about the idea of sonder, that everyone is living a life just as complex and important as yours. So many times we look at our perspectives and the consequences to us, while forgetting that in any interaction, the other person has just as many needs and complications. It is that idea of where the balance lies between societal and individual gain.

We also began to explore songs written by Bob Dylan, especially with the purpose of activism. Many of these songs touched on issues such as the Vietnam war and the Cuban missile crisis. Being quite close to poetry, I was able to transfer my skills to better analyse and understand the intent Bob Dylan had, whether it was the connotation of his words of the repetition of certain lines.

All in all I can see how the idea of representing people and telling their stories links to our ever-changing world for we use stories to process and share our individual experiences.