write a review of a media object of your choosing, analyzing how it presents an issue related to our course topic of sex and society. This media object might be a book, film, tv show, song, advertisement, social media account, news article, or any other public-facing cultural object that you feel warrants critical analysis and discussion.
Your review should be written in the form of a blog post that you imagine being published on a particular forum or website. Please specify this publication in your review by adding it to your header, whether real or imagined. In the review itself, you will be responsible for meeting a few criteria:
- Introduce and contextualize your chosen media object: what is it and where does it come from? When was it made and how was it received? What can this object teach us about the relationship between sex and society?
- Identify a specific excerpt, scene, or detail to ground your review and allow for more in-depth analysis of how the object mediates issues relating to sex and sexuality. What decisions are made at an aesthetic level, and how do such representational choices inform the social meanings that are being attributed to sex in the media object?
- Present specific criteria for your review: What do you think makes for an effective/ineffective, responsible/irresponsible, enabling/harmful representation of sex and sexuality in society? And how does the media object that you’ve identified meet or not meet those criteria?
This assignment asks you to think critically about how issues of sex, gender, and sexuality are mediated in society. By engaging with a specific media object of your choosing, you will develop skills in close reading, critical analysis, and evaluative argumentation. My hopes are that you will apply critical concepts and theoretical frameworks that we have developed over the first half of the semester in order to analyze a feature of our congested media environments with authority, clarity, precision, and persuasiveness. Your reviews should aim to be approximately 750 words.
For advice on writing reviews and links to sample reviews, check out this resource from the New York Times.
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