October 19, 2006

Episode #3: Gender and Sexuality in the Media

Show3

February 15, 2007
Live from SCAT Studio
90 Union Square, Somerville

This episode looks at the subject of portrayals of gender roles and stereotypes of sexuality in the media, asking what kinds of stereotypes are prevalent in the media, if they really do influence audiences, and if so, how?  How have media depictions of gender roles and sexuality stereotypes changed over the past two decades? Don't we see a wider representation of women in charge, gay men playing lead roles and people starting to come out in Hollywood these days? Are transgender people well represented in movies like Boys Don't Cry and Trans America?  Some have argued that we have moved past a media saturated society to a fully mediated society whose members are so inured to media manipulation that we refuse to believe anything we see or hear that we don't want to believe. Is this true? And if so, do stereotypical depictions in the media still have the power to affect us in our daily lives? How so? What is the media's RESPONSIBILITY regarding its depiction of gender and sexuality?

January 24, 2007

Guests For Episode #3

Andisutton

Andi Sutton
www.bittermelon.org
http://mit.edu/gcws/

Andi Sutton is an artist and curator living in Boston, Massachusetts.  Her work explores the potential of applied performance methodology and dialogue-based practice to create alternative models for community.  She is currently pursuing this work through the collectively produced National Bitter Melon Council project as the Director of Public Relations for the NBMC. These and other collaborative and solo works take the form of web, food, agriculture and street intervention, video, performance, and installation, and also through curatorial work with the Berwick Research Institute's Public Art Incubator Program (co-curator 2004-2006.)  Her work has been shown in New York and Boston at such places as the Anthology Film Archives, the Boston Center for the Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Tufts and Harvard Universities among others, and also at CSA farms, in gardens, on adventurous tongues and inside hungry bellies.  Sutton graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. In addition to her art practice, she is the Program Coordinator for the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Breckenschwartz Dr. Brecken Chinn Swartz
Dr. Brecken Chinn Swartz makes use of a variety of research methods to explore processes of communication and broadcast production, with a particular interest in how mediated constructions of gender and culture impact social processes.  Brecken has spent a number of years in Asia and concentrates much of her work on cross-Pacific research and dialogue.  She teaches courses in Communication Theory, Intercultural Communication, and Gender and Media, most recently for CCTV. She has a Ph.D. in International Broadcasting from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.


Jamesnadeau James Nadeau
James Nadeau is an independent curator, video artist and writer based in Boston. He is a contributor to the online arts journal Big, Red and Shiny. He is a recent graduate of the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His essay “Smile for the Camera” will be included in the anthology “The Inner History of Devices” edited by Sherry Turkle (MIT Press, Spring 2007). His videos have been screened in festivals internationally and installations/performances have been presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle. He has curated film and video programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Rhode Island International Film Festival, the Provincetown I nternational Film Festival, the Brattle Theatre and at art spaces and galleries in the Boston area.

Lisahenderson Lisa Henderson
Lisa Henderson is Associate Professor of Communication and Faculty Affiliate in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and director of CISA, the Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas.  Henderson is the author of essays in sexual representation, cultural production, feminist media studies, and cultural studies of social class in a number of collections and such journals as Signs, Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Screen, and Journal of Homosexuality.  As ethnographer of cultural production, her research has addressed filmmaking, film school, literary reception, public photography and National Public Radio; as cultural critic she has written on sexuality and popular celebrity, lesbian pornography, queer visibility and social class, lesbian and transgender cinema, the queerness of televised sport, the politics of pedagogy, and queer theory in communication.  She has also appeared as featured critic in Off the Straight and Narrow (Sender, Media Education Foundation, 1998), Class Dismissed: How Television Portrays the Working Class (Alper, Media Education Foundation, 2005) and Further Off the Straight and Narrow: New Gay Visibility on Television 1998-2006 (Sender, Media Education Foundation, 2006).  Her current book project is titled Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production.

February 23, 2007

Gender Sexuality, and Media: Watch it Here!