"Women as objects to be surveyed."

Since the first class this semester, we have discussed many things. We have mainly discussed how to pick apart an advertisement and see how the advertiser may negatively stereotype and portray a certain gender, ethnicity, race, or even an economic class. Reading works by Anandi Ramamurthy and looking at her details we see how these advertisers work. Looking at the textbook we learn to observe the world around us and see the stereotypes all over. The piece “Never Just Pictures” by Susan Bordo helps to prove some of Ramamurthy’s ideas.
Ramamurthy talks about how women are constantly being surveyed. The photographer surveys their subject and decides what is photographic. The consumers survey the women in the ad and try to become the woman in the photograph no matter how the woman is portrayed. Ramamurthy mentions how advertisers are trying to constantly create an illusion of desire even if the image is “cut-up” similar to a Picasso painting.
Susan Bordo notes in her piece that it is beautiful to look messed up, similar to what Ramamurthy mentions about the Picasso. Most of the women shown in ads today are dead looking or “heroin chic”. She questions why it is beautiful to look as if your arms are dislocated and your eyes a popping out of their sockets. Could it possibly be that the advertisers are telling us is OK to be depressed and that it’s a beautiful thing? This just tells all of America “Hey! It’s OK to have an eating disorder!” Bordo goes on to analyze these points and some of them confirm Ramamurthy’s thoughts on how women are portrayed in ads. For example, Ramamurthy tells us about “the increasing dominance of the fashion photographer” just like Bordo tells us how the dead models have a power over American youth’s minds.
The fact that advertisers have such power over the public is scary. Ramamurthy proves that all advertising does is trick us into thinking things, and Bordo gives us examples of how advertisers do this.

Class #4 Wrap Up and Response

For Monday be sure to have read the following pages in Seeing & Writing: 3-25, 27-37, 378 – 382, 393-405 564-566, 618-622

In addition, post here on the blog a consideration of one of the prose pieces (no pictures, I'm afraid) which catch your interest. Make a specific connection between a passage from one of those pieces (a paragraph or so) and our overall discussion of Ramamurthy, advertising, and representation of gender, race or class. Make this at least 250 words, and no more than 400 words. In addition, write a one paragraph comment on someone else's post.

VERY IMPORTANT: This time through, please post individual posts rather than adding comments to my post. This makes both reading and commenting on one another's work a bit easier on the eyes.

A few general comments:

Don't despair my comments on your first attempts. All of you will, with some work, find the path to a successful paper. Remember, however, that writing is a process and, more importantly, it is a process that demands we don't get too attached to what we've written. What's critical here is that you end up with an excellent final first paper critiquing an advertisement's representation of a gender, race or class, not that every paragraph from your preliminary writing ends up in that first paper. Also remember that paying attention to the demands of the assignment is critical to college writing: the essay prompt called for using the specific details of the advertisement to demonstrate how that ad may be interpreted to be at the expense of (a gender, race or class), and we'll have to stick to that goal in every draft.

Also, Jason was right on when he suggested that the final result of weaving these two pieces together will be a somewhat complexified 'pros and cons' argument. That is, after showing your reader both a positive and a negative 'reading' of you advertisement, which argument is stronger? On Monday we will work on using quotations from Ram. , easing transitions between the positive and the negative, and other things which will make the mixture easier for you. In any case, those of you who need to should be going back to your advertisement and searching for more details and analysis of those details...