Women's & Gender Studies: Multimedia

Introduction -- Female empowerment? -- The doll wars -- Idealized beauty -- The pink-blue dichotomy -- Misogyny and double standards -- Media literacy, education, and choice.

"Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized commercial performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman's central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations"--Container.