The Power of Language

Media and language are both powerful tools that ignite or disengage us. Over and over again, media and language reinforce or worsen the gap in the United States. A simple example I can give is when there is a room full of girls and we call them 'guys', we say, "hello guys". When we become aware of the English language we can begin to recognize the linguistic sexism, meaning, language that intentionally or unintentionally excludes or privileges one sex over the other. However, more times than not, women are being excluded or trivialized, while maintaining the sex status quo from which men are currently benefiting. Some example of spoken everyday language we use is fireman, policeman, postman, the explanation of those words assumes male dominance in these fields, the proper alternatives would be Firefighter, Police Officer, Postal worker, especially because we all know that female workers do have professions in those fields. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Symbolic Annihilation

Image
We have been seeing a lot of the protest occurring in Minneapolis from the unrighteous nine minute video of a white cop taking a life of a black person, who was defenseless. This act is a perfect example of Symbolic Annihilation, wherein social groups that lack power in society are rendered absent, condemned, or trivialized through mass media representations that simultaneously reinforce dominant ideologies and the privilege of dominant groups (Gerbner 1976). Often times many cultures are misrepresented on the media, for example President trump in two distinct occurrences with different ethnic backgrounds handled the circumstances very differently. If only the two different occurrences were handled in the same humility as in April 16th, 2020 incident. 
Read more

Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity

Image
Hegemonic Masculinity refers to a specific type of culturally-valued masculinity tied to marriage and the characteristics of being sexually attracted to solely to people of the opposite sex (heterosexuality), and patriarchal authority in the workplace and family life and these positions of thought are maintained in its advantage through subordinating other less dominant forms of masculinity. For example, the power and influence over others, like men of lower socioeconomic classes or gay men. This is my family, and I wouldn't refer us all to traditionally comply with the normative ideal of femininity, as it is oriented toward serving the interest of men, wherein, this is focused as Emphasized femininity (Cornell 1987).
Read more