World of Warcraft LARPing

After visiting Twilight fan sites in class seeing the seriousness with which some people take their loyalties for these franchises got me to thinking about my friend and how he’s really into world of warcraft. I started doing research on the fan community of the game and found that the fans of this game are more serious about their fandom than the Twihard community. There are tons and tons of fan forums and blogs in which people display their desire for the game but what I think might be the strangest display of fandom was the numerous videos that I found of World of Warcraft fans LARPing. LARPing stands for Live Action Role Playing. Fans of the World of Warcraft game set up dates where anyone in the fan community can come and dress up like their favorite WoW character and they battle each other in a location (usually a park). The people that LARP create his or her own weapons and are really serious about these battles. I think that this is fandom at its most extreme.

Here’s a link to one of the LARPing battles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWngPmFULIg

Aspirational TV

Television shows such as Sex and The City, The Cosby Show, and Gossip Girl attempt to portray the lives of working class or regular Americans. These shows try to relate to its working class viewers by portraying that they are in a sense no different from them. They attempt to portray that they go through the same problems that plague real working class citizens. What these shows do is the exact opposite though. These shows portray these supposedly ordinary working people with regular jobs, and sometimes no job at all, in big houses with nice décor and very active social lives. The lives that are shown on these television shows are in fact not relatable to its working class audience. These aspirational television shows give viewers the idea that if they work hard enough then they too can obtain the great success that the characters in the shows achieve. While these types of aspirational television shows can usually be seen in sitcoms, it can also be seen in the reality television shows that we watch also. Shows such as Jersey Shore and The Real World seem to show ordinary people living these not so ordinary lives, living in nice houses and having so much fun without doing much of anything.  

Judith Butler and Baby Storm

Judith Butler believes that “ the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is socially constructed; hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex.” In other words the gender that we perform is not static, it is learned and can be changed or performed differently from the sex we were born as. Gender performance is learned from a young age, we learn how girls and boys are supposed to act and dress from the media, our parents and our peers.

After reading Butler’s essay I remembered a news story that I read a while back about a couple from Toronto who had a baby that they named Storm, but they weren’t going to disclose the sex of the baby to anyone. They wanted to raise a genderless baby. The parents wanted to let Storm make his/her own decisions about what he/she wanted to wear how he/she wanted to act or perform. There was a lot of outrage from parents and experts on this story. Most people said that Storm’s parents were messing their child up psychologically by not telling him/her what gender he/she is. This story provides an example of how gender is learned and can be fluid in its performance. Baby Storm has the freedom of being himself/herself and doesn’t have to worry about performing gender correctly. Although I’m not sure if the choice that these parents have made is the most ethical I think that it would be interesting to see how Storm turns out. 

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/baby-storm-raised-genderless-gender-dangerous-experiment-child/story?id=13693760#.T35hLHgh9UQ

Tough Guy Image

Jackson Katz’s Tough Guise video gave insight on how violence in the media feed into the reason as to why men are violent in their real lives. There is a constant pressure on men in our society to be manly and to not in any way shape or form appear weak or show their emotions. Jackson Katz talks about this pressure coming from images that we see everyday in the media. bell hooks also talks about the media playing a major role in how we as a society view reality. Katz states that “the media frames violent masculinity as a cultural norm.” Movies in which men are dominant and violent become the way in which we believe that that’s the way things work in reality and men feel a pressure to live up to the standards that we see on television and in movies. If they don’t live up to these standards then they are labeled as “fags” and “mommas boys” as stated in Katz’s video.

While watching the Katz video I started to think about all of the show Guy Code and how the men and women contributors on the show kind of reinforce the guise of men being tough and strong, not showing emotions and just being men. I think that this show and other shows are in a way contributing to the cycle of the “tough man” image. 

GMA and Trayvon Martin

Yesterday I watched a broadcast of Good Morning America with the lawyer of George Zimmerman and one of Zimmerman’s friends named Joe Oliver. In the interview Zimmerman’s friend insists that Zimmerman was not at all, in any way shape or form racist. The interview went on to talk about how there is evidence that supports Zimmerman’s self defense case. The comments under the video reminded me of the topic of colorblind racism and the four frames that are used to display it. There were comments that fit into the frames of naturalization, cultural racism and minimization. One person even went as far as saying that “black people made this whole thing up, just to get attention, because that’s what they do”, which made me think of the cultural racism frame and another comment suggested that “black people are blowing this whole thing out of proportion and using the race card to justify a thug being shot by an upstanding citizen,” which made me think of the minimization frame of colorblind racism. There were even racist comments by black users toward Zimmerman and the fact that the friend that was speaking out on his behalf was black. I was shocked by these comments and it made me realize that racism still exists in many forms and it helped me to better understand the concept of colorblind racism. 

bell hooks and Dangerous Minds

After reading the bell hooks essay on othering, I started to think of all the movies in which white individuals come into a situation to “help” or learn things from people of different backgrounds or “others”. One movie that stuck out to me in particular was Dangerous Minds. Dangerous Minds is about a white woman named LouAnn who is hired to teach a class of “special” kids. This class is made up of mostly African American and Latino high school kids who have learning problems and behavioral problems. Her first day of teaching the class is rough, they don’t listen to her and they aren’t interested in what she is trying to teach them. LouAnn contemplates quitting, but then decides against it. She feels that she can help these kids and offer them knowledge that will better their lives. While LouAnn teaches and helps the kids, she realizes that they are helping her too. They are helping her to understand what life is like for them and they teach her that she is tougher than she originally thought, making her a better teacher in the end. In her essay, bell hooks explains how the media often portrays white people developing an interest to “others” or people of a race other than white. She states that White people don’t do this to dominate the “other” but they do it “…to be changed in some way by the encounter”. With that being said, it is seen through the movie how LouAnn’s life has been changed by the kids that she teaches and how they have helped her to become a better person and teacher.