Seeing & Writing Online Community - Chapter 4: Projecting Gender

2006 Super Bowl Ads + Chris Ballard's "How to Write a Catchy Beer Ad"

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 09:41:34 -0600

If you're working with Chris Ballard's, "How to Write a Catchy Beer Ad" in Chapter 4, Projecting Gender, or discussing t.v. ads in general, here's a useful resource.

AOL has created a "Best of 2006 Super Bowl" mini-site at: http://sports.aol.com/nfl/superbowlads. The video clips are viewable within your browser, and are organized by quarter. (You can also click on "See All Commercials" at the bottom of the page for a full list.) The interface is a little sluggish, but functional.

Surefire Class: Projecting Gender

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:34:49 -0600

My “sure-fire�? strategy for helping students to write a highly critical and reflective cause and effect paper involves three steps: first, introducing the specifics of the causal analysis paper; second, having students read Susan Bordo’s Never Just Pictures and study the pictures in Retrospect: Building the Male Body and Lauren Greenfield’s Ashleigh, 13, with Her Friend and Parents, Santa Monica; and third, discussing the essay and images in conjunction with an exploration of digital images.

SURE-FIRE CLASS: Our Bodies, Our Selves

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:21:33 -0600

For each of the units in my freshman writing class, I try to define a core question. For our unit on “The Body�? (Chapter 4, “Embodying Identity�?), the question is a rather obvious but extremely critical one: what is the relationship between body and self-identity, between who we are and how we appear physically to the world? At the beginning of the unit, students speak rather glibly about the gap between our physical selves and “who we really are�?; it doesn’t matter how you look, they say, since it’s what you are on the inside that counts. Although this is true in so many important respects, I encourage students not to ignore the complications of our body/soul duality; while the content of our hearts and minds and souls matter most, we meet the world and the world meets us through and with our bodies. I ask students to consider all the situations in which what is on the inside does not “count�? as it should and with what consequences. How can we negotiate that land-mined terrain between how others see us with their eyes and how they see us as people, that is, make judgments about who we are?

Surefire Assignment: Gender Ad Analysis

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:18:03 -0600

In this assignment I ask students to find at least three images of female or male body shapes from current advertising media and to attach a copy of each image to their papers. They then analyze the images they find, considering the following factors, and draw conclusions from their observations:

Surefire Assignment: Being All You Can Be

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:16:28 -0600

For a good in-class essay prompt, I ask if the Army ad, “There’s Something About a Soldier,�? perpetuates stereotypes or breaks them. (It works even better if you can place it in the context of other ads, some more stereotypical and some less so.) People seem able to argue convincingly for both sides.