Module 2 Video/Reading Reflections

In the first reading, The Inversion of Visibility, one sections talked about spotlighting accountability, not possibility. What caught my eyes is when Volatile states ” Perhaps the biggest problem Americans are facing as a society is that we have a hard time believing in possibility, imagining that things could be otherwise”. I thought this sentence related well with the videos we watched because I think we are so stuck on the roles that males are better than females and we just keep things the way they are instead of challenging the possibilities of what could be. We could have more female roles in movies, female presidents, and so many more other possibilities to give women a stronger role in our society. Since I can remember I’ve always herd the role how women should be the ones who stay home with their babies, clean the house, and cook. We need to challenge those stereotypes and roles because maybe the female wants to go out and get a big time job and not have to be the one who is being depended on to stay at home. This brings me to the other reading, The Children Are Watching How the Media Teach About Diversity. Stereotyping has been a another social issue. For this to end we need to stop categorizing and generalizing about people according to Cortes. TV newscasts, TV shows, movies, and so many other types of media keep backing up the idea of these generalizations and stereotypes we have in our society. Cortes states, ” Teachers constantly disseminate or contribute to student construction of group generalizations”. (149, Cortes). In the end schools need to educate students to look at these labels, stereotypes, and generalizations in detail. Looking at all the evidence that is out there. Being able to generalize without stereotyping. This will help students process information they see in our multicultural society in a constructivist viewpoint.

Watching the first video it was my first time learning about what a trope is. Ive watched all those movies she mentioned and it is funny how I never realized the Smurfette principle. I even laughed at the thought that princess Leah in Star Wars was the only visible female character in the whole movie and whole “galactic empire”. I never opened my mind to these ideas or questioned why this was. Agreeing with Katlyn and how professor Tollefson stated in her video the five key questions that media literate people ask, maybe if I had been more open minded and more media literate I would have noticed these things. This type of trope is still an ongoing problem in our daily media intake. The second video where she talked about the Bechdel test was also new for me. I would love to go back to all the movies I watched and see if this is true for most of them. There were three questions that need to be asked. The first is, “it has to have at least two women”. Second, ” do they talk to each other”. Lastly, “do they talk about something other than a man”. Again she showed so many different movies that did not past the test and a lot of those movies I have watched, but once again did not realize the sexism and lack of female roles in them. Maybe now when I watch movies I will keep an eye out for these different topics and viewpoints.