I thoroughly enjoyed, despite moments of cringing and disbelief, the documentary Miss Representation shown in class yesterday. The film examines the issues of underrepresentation, symbolic annihilation, and the hegemonic control that a patriarchal society exerts over the media.

As I did the readings and watched the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly, I began to think back to my own childhood memories of Disney and their films. The first Disney movie I can remember having watched was Bambi, and it was quite special for me. At that time, my family lived in a small ranch [...]

I was recently introduced to a certain website that purports to document through stories and photos the supposedly bizarre world found in Walmart retail stores.

My brother Ivan works in San Francisco for a video game development company owned by Electronic Arts, the fourth largest video game developer in the world and the number one publisher in the West. He recently alerted me to a story that broke in October that had to do with workplace racism at a start [...]

Today in class we discussed the uses of American Indians in sports mascots, such as the Cleveland Indians, and whether or not it’s offensive to the represented ethnic groups. One of the readings also dealt with the history of American Indian representations in film and other media, covering the use of “redface” – similar to [...]

For a country where one of the most popular daily newspapers publishes a glossy color broadsheet of a topless pin-up girl weekly, Chile isn’t the most progressive country in terms of patriarchy, women’s representation and gender roles.

In class today, we viewed and discussed Eminem and Rihanna’s music video “Love the Way You Lie,” which I had only seen once before, for the class readings. I fully understand and agree with the interpretation provided by Rachel Alicia Griffin and Joshua Daniel Phillips in the textbook. Indeed, the three cultural myths that are [...]

One of the things I found most difficult growing up as a child of Chilean immigrants in the United States was the ethnic stereotypes based on where I was living at the time. Being of last name “Ortega” mean that I was Mexican in Texas and Puerto Rican in Connecticut.

After watching the film “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,” which absolutely fascinated me because I love history -especially stories of marginalized groups – I was left curious about contemporary black media. Pardoning my ignorance, I googled around a bit and found a few online newspapers, including theGrio.com, an online division of NBC News with [...]

The reading that most struck me, particularly in its use of photography, was the Vanity Fair article, “Who is Wall Street’s Queen B.?” The article perpetuated the gender stereotype of women who compete as being in a cat fight (sorority “kittens” anyone?) and the sexualization of this for the pleasure of the male gaze/perception. The degrading nicknames [...]