Over the course of the past 4-5 months, we have been exploring the concept of representation by studying works such as the poems of Carol Ann Duffy, satires of Saint Hoax, past and present ads, political cartoons, song lyrics, movies, and many more. The central idea behind the unit was the question, “Can you truly represent everyone?” with the primary focus being on the portrayal of women in the media and in advertising.

My mind immediately goes back to one of the very first assignments we did, which is when we looked ag Crazy Rich Asians as our first real case study on representation. The surface level argument was that the film is a historical landmark in that it is the first film to feature an all-Asian cast and is a barrier-breaker of sorts within Hollywood, but when we looked a bit closer, we discovered that the film glosses over the not-so glamorous aspects of Singapore and doesn’t even include one non-Chinese Asian character, raising questions over the validity of its representation. This is when the aforementioned question first came up, and it made me realize just how monocultural the media I personally consume is (movies, music). I can’t name one non-white character from my favourite movie of all time, Almost Famous, and 90% of the music I listen to is from old white men. However, what I more importantly realized is that I don’t really care if this is the case. I don’t consume media based on the average skin colour of all the people in it or the amount of countries represented, I choose to consume media if I feel I can make an emotional connection to it or not. This takes me back to a think piece I wrote about The Breakfast Club; there is no way that movie would fly in today’s ultra-sensitive, representation-centric world, but I still wouldn’t change a thing about it, simply because it is a timeless piece of filmmaking and storytelling.

Another idea from the unit that jumps out to me is intertextuality, and we explored this primarily through the works and poems of Carol Ann Duffy, more specifically her The World’s Wife collection. We studied a number of poems from the world’s wife including ‘Thetis’, ‘Penelope’, ‘Little Red Cap’, ‘Medusa’, ‘Mrs Midas’, and ‘Salome’, which explore themes of feminism and the portrayal of women in the media. The latter theme was consolidated by studying ads and cartoons from Saint Hoax’s ‘Make America Misogynistic Again’ campaign. As eye-opening as this study was to the dystopia women have had to face in the media and still continue to face to this day, although to a lesser extent, comparing Duffy texts to other non-literary texts was what captured me the most, since it drove home the point that every text is somehow related. Entering poetry-world and then snapping back out of it only to find real-world connections to what I’d just been studying was refreshing and something new to me. The cross between literary and non-literary elements is where my interest lies, and doing so allowed me to gain new insights into themes such as identity and (mis)representation.