Identity & Performance in Popular Culture
Featuring Sut Jhally
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Contains two versions: a full length version (72 minutes) and an abridged version (46 minutes) which has been edited for nudity and length.
Sections: Introduction | Sex & Gender | The Feminine Touch | The Ritualization of Subordination | Licensed Withdrawal | Infantilization | The Codes of Masculinity | Trapped in the Code | History, Power & Gender Display
(Viewer Discretion Advisory: This program contains violence, nudity, and sexual themes.)
Sut Jhally is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation. He is one of the world's leading scholars looking at the role played by advertising and popular culture in the processes of social control and identity construction. The author of numerous books and articles on media (including The Codes of Advertising and Enlightened Racism) he is also an award-winning teacher (a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Massachusetts, where the student newspaper has also voted him "Best Professor"). In addition, he has been awarded the Distinguished Outreach Award, and was selected to deliver a Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2007. He is best known as the producer and director of a number of films and videos (including Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video; Tough Guise: Media, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity; and Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire) that deal with issues ranging from gender, sexuality and race to commercialism, violence and politics. Born in Kenya, raised in England, educated in graduate studies in Canada, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
International Communication Association conference
Boston
May 26 - 30, 2011 Eastern Communication Association
Arlington, VA
April 15, 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
New Orleans
March 10 - 13, 2011 New England Sociological Association
Durham, NH
November 6, 2010 Southwestern Sociological Association annual meeting
Houston, TX
April 2, 2010 Pacific Sociological Association annual meeting
Oakland, CA
April 8 - 11, 2010 Central States Communication Association convention
Cincinnati, OH
April 17, 2010 Console-ing Passions
Eugene, OR
April 22 - 24, 2010 American Sociological Association's annual meeting
Atlanta, GA
August 14 - 17, 2010 Mid-South Sociological Association conference
Baton Rouge, LA
October 13 - 17, 2010