COMM Assignment 9 Yingquan Wang
1. Essentialist view of identity: All of us have an essence of identity, a core value of ourselves that doesn't change; categories of identity are natural, necessary and universal (Eg. all women are caring)
2. Anti-essentialist/social constructivist view of identity: unstable and temporary effect of relations that define identities by marking differences, recognizes the differences among people
3. Othering/"The Other": refers to both positive and negative stereotypes, causing separations among groups of people
4. Interpellation: when a person accepts that they are being addressed
5. Noble Savage: used to refer to the American Indians, that they are different from "us" because they are naturally better than us in some crucial aspects, and that they are less completely human than we are.
6. Burden of Representation: burden for a positive image to represent the essence of a specific group because it's impossible for something to be a perfect representative of a full group
7. Big Issue Strategy: placing the Other's difference at the heart of the narrative, making the character only identifiable by their difference
8. Story in the Past strategy: setting the story in the past, making it simpler than it should be and allowing the audience to distant from any present version of the problem
9. Sidney Poitier strategy: making the Other so impeccably good that they cannot be disliked when the issue it the central focus of the film, giving the groups of Other pressure to be like the character
10. Power Fantasy strategy: providing a figure of wish fulfillment of the Other, often portrayed as heroic and undefeatable, emphasizes that such characters are only a wish
11. Token Strategy: when the other appear without being the central focus of the narrative, satisfies the need for diversity, integrates the Other into the mainstream community but keeps them out of the action that drives the narrative
12. Exnomination: when no one mentions the fact that the Other is actually Other, "not naming". Can be freeing to the members of a group (white)
13. Power of Repetition/Recycled Variations on a Theme: pop images circulating for a long time with little connection to the "real" other than other images
1. In the section about interpellation (p. 90-91), Smith makes the point that the "hey you's' (the address part of interpellation) have to be both narrow and broad. What do you think he means by that? Why do they have to be both narrow and broad?
The address of interpellation needs to be both narrow and broad in order to create the effect it wishes to convey. Smith is referring to the size of the topic the text is discussing, or the audience group it's attempting to reach. Being narrow enough will make the media to target a specific group of audience, and being broad enough will ensure that this group of audience isn't too narrow that the media don't communicate with enough. A good example of this is advertisement, that when a product is being advertised,