Paper Assignment #2
Due: October 27, 2000
Length: 5 pages, double-spaced, not including cover sheet, Works Cited page, or attached advertisements
Reminders: use MLA style to cite your sources and to create your Works Cited page; use 1" margins all around, and a standard font; double-space; attach a title page to the front of your paper with your name and a title for your paper; do not put your name anywhere inside the body of your paper; use only one staple to keep your pages together.
This paper will encourage you to critique the messages that popular magazines are sending us. Perhaps you have been aware of them, or perhaps you never paid close attention to exactly what magazines have to say about us and our culture. In writing this paper you will investigate very closely the messages and meta-messages provided by these magazines.
Before you begin this assignment, it will help if you read through Chapter 8 of WIAS, Gender and the Institutional Media of Communication, one of the readings due on the date this paper is due.
The exercise in Box 8-1 on page 258 of WIAS will be the starting point for your investigation. Choose 4 magazines published in the same month and year: 2 "traditional women's magazines", such as those suggested in Box 8-1; and 2 other magazines of your choice not considered to be "traditional women's magazines" (choices such as Utne Reader, Wired, Time and similar, and Sports Illustrated are all good picks—please e-mail me if you would like further suggestions or help in choosing these other 2 magazines). Create a chart such as Box 8-1 suggests, and fill in the answers to the questions that the exercise raises. This should fill up approximately 1-2 of the 5 pages of your paper.
The rest of your paper will be spent in an expanded discussion of question 6 (you may choose to just put a few highlights of your expanded discussion in your chart, and have the expanded discussion be a separate component of the paper):
Choose a collection of different advertisements to tear out of the 4 magazines; these ads should feature both men and women, or things that are symbolically masculine and feminine. Label each ad as to which magazine it is from, and attach all of them to the end of your paper. Analyze the stereotypes they present (gender, race, class, etc.), and use some of the following suggestions to help you create a thorough critique of the ads:
- Try using the "turn-around test" and imagine that the males are females and the females are males: what does this exercise disclose about the situation of men and women in our culture, and how they are perceived and presented by these magazines? You can also try this in terms of race, class, age, etc.
- Are there any trends in the ads that you can perceive? Think about the different magazines that they ran in, their intended audience, etc.
- Try another turn-around test, this time imagining how the ads would be received and perceived if they were to appear in a different kind of magazine.
- Compare the ads to the copy that it was next to in the magazine. For instance, is there an article touting the virtues of a particular product, with an ad for the same product on the opposite page? And if so, what might this mean?
After you've finished this investigation, organize it in a manner that makes sense to you, polish up your thoughts, add an introduction and a conclusion, proofread it, and you're done!
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