JCM212/Outline a journal article

This in-class exercise is not a group project, but you may ask for advice from your fellow group members. This exercise is worth three points toward the semester's total of 95 points. There will also be a question related to it on the final exam.

Select an article on the representation of race, ethnicity, or gender

1. Pick one of the following articles.
   • If you have an article you've found on your own, you may use it; but it must be from an academic, peer-reviewed journal. Check with me beforehand if you're uncertain. If your article is not appropriate, you will be required to do the alternative assignment.
2. Using the article's author-and-title information, find an electronic copy of it through the Library's search resources.
   • If you have trouble finding it, reach out to the librarian who provided our training sessions, James Gilbreath (jngilbreath@ua.edu). He'd be happy to hear from you!
3. Print the article and bring it to class on Wednesday, 4/4.
4. Use your printed article to do an in-class exercise similar to the one we did with academic books.
   • Students who fail to bring an article will be given an alternative assignment (with a one-point deduction).

Suggested articles and their abstracts

1. Jonathan J. Cavallero, "Hitchcock and Race: Is the Wrong Man a White Man?"
   • First paragraph: So much scholarship has appeared on alfred hitchcock that Thomas Leitch has written that “it makes sense to speak of Hitchcock studies as a field of study” (“Hitchcock and Company”). Yet the representation of race and ethnicity in Hitchcock’s work has been neglected. Only two essays, James Morrison’s “Hitchcock’s Ireland: The Performance of Irish Identity in Juno and the Paycock and Under Capricorn” and Richard Allen’s “Sir John and the Half-Caste: Identity and Representation in Hitchcock’s Murder!” purport to treat this important topic in any kind of detail. Morrison treats Irish identity not as a cultural phenomenon but rather as a political one. That is, identities are framed in relation to the political borders within which the characters operate (Ireland and Australia, respectively) and their relationships to British colonial power. Methods of communication, stereotypes, food, kinship patterns, cultural roles, and other folkways are largely ignored. Allen’s essay investigates Hitchcock’s cinematic adaptation of Clemence Dane’s Enter Sir John. In Dane’s novel, the murderous villain’s (Handel Fane) racial identity as a “half-caste” assures his guilt and thereby plays a more significant narrative role than in Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930). Allen argues that Hitchcock’s decision to emphasize Fane’s sexual identity while reducing his racial background to a MacGuffin represents “the achievement of the work” while simultaneously pointing “to the limits of that achievement.” Hitchcock uses the racial/racist theme of the novel to complicate the idea of an overly simplistic notion of sexual identities, but in so doing, he leaves the "casual racism of the ‘halfcaste’ moniker unresolved” (123).
2. Jennifer Esposito, "What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial (?) Representations on a Television Sitcom"
   • Abstract: This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a “color-blind society” (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances). This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as “postracial” (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage. As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.
3. Dana Fennell, Ana S.Q. Liberato, Bridget Hayden, and Yuko Fujino, "Consuming Anime"
   • Abstract: Researchers are increasingly recognizing anime and manga as worthy of scholarly examination. However, relatively little research examines how fans synthesize the cultural content of anime. This paper provides an analysis of representations of race/ethnicity and gender in two televised anime, and contrasts the understandings of scholars to fans. As anime can weave together images from Japanese culture, other cultures, as well as fantasy, anime presents many faces to fans. Fans do not necessarily see all of these faces at once, and they interpret the cultural content of anime differently. As a result, anime has the potential to generate different types of cultural influence.
4. May Friedman, "Here comes a lot of judgment: Honey Boo Boo as a site of reclamation and resistance"
   • Abstract: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (2012−) is a gleeful spectacle of a show, filled with fat bellies, loud bodies, messy food and laughter. As much parody as ‘reality’ TV, the show profiles a southern US family as emblematic ‘rednecks’ and invites viewers to watch, laugh and judge. Yet in the depths of this heavily mediated version of southern American family life, there are strong messages about bodies, about class and about motherhood, and the ways that in transgressing dominant discourses, Honey Boo Boo unwittingly moves beyond farce and instead presents a strong critique of normativity. This article seeks to expose the dominant tropes of the show, especially in relation to three areas: class, fat, and maternity. In exposing the messaging of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and the ways that the show’s narrative both maintains and resists dominant discourses, the show can be seen as an example of resistance and reclamation. Drawing on analyses of white trash culture and presentations of fat bodies, as well as the emergent field of freak studies, the article positions Here Comes Honey Boo Boo within a broader analysis of reality TV that suggests a new phase in our consumption of difference and the fluid and disruptive boundaries of the ‘normal’.
5. Racquel Gates, "Activating the Negative Image"
   • Abstract: In this article, I propose that scholars should strategically embrace the designation of “negative” that has long been assigned to disreputable images of blackness. I argue that these negative images engage in excess in a way that is inversely proportionate to the lack of any such contemplations of identity in respectable media texts. Activating the definition of “negative” as “expressing or containing negation or denial” reveals the ways that disreputable images such as those found in reality television disrupt hegemonic norms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Viewed from this perspective, television shows like Love and Hip Hop exemplify the intersectional marginalization of black women. If the current post-racial, colorblind moment is really a color-mute one (to quote Linda Williams)—where identity is seen but cannot be uttered—then the negative image functions as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media.
6. Patricia D. Hopkins, "Deconstructing Good Times and The Cosby Show: In Search of My 'Authentic' Black Experience"
   • Abstract: As countless critics of The Cosby Show (1984-1992) would have us believe, the Huxtable family, as portrayed and envisioned by educator and comedian Bill Cosby, is not the traditional representation of Black family life. For many critics, as well as some Cosby show defenders, the experience depicted by the fictional Huxtable family was the unique experience of too few African Americans at the time; the suggestion is that the family is very wealthy. Contrary to the moral majority, its critics and defenders, I am not from the upper or middle classes like the Huxtable family; however, I identified with The Cosby Show more than with its predecessors, like Good Times (1974-1979). African Americans are no different than any other American group, and therefore, as writer and novelist Wendy Alexia Rountree suggests in her article “‘Faking the Funk’: A Journey Towards Authentic Blackness,” we “should be allowed to develop individual identities that are not considered in conflict with our ethnic group identity but as a legitimate part of it.” Consequently, as someone who identifies with The Cosby Show; who is an autistic, working-class Black female from the projects of East Harlem with two Ivy League degrees; and for whom cowboy boots are her footwear of choice, I say, take Good Times and The Cosby Show if you must, but leave me my Black experience.
7. Chiaoning Su, "From perpetual foreigner to national hero: a narrative analysis of US and Taiwanese news coverage of Linsanity"
   • Linsanity was the buzzword of 2012 even for those who did not follow sports news. The term was coined when Jeremy Lin, an undrafted player in the National Basketball Association (NBA), seemingly came from nowhere to resuscitate the New York Knicks following a disappointing season start. Yet, Linsanity signifies a more complex phenomenon than sudden fame. As the first Taiwanese-American in the NBA, Jeremy Lin’s racial background made him an anomaly on the American basketball court and a hero to Taiwanese. Media portrayal of Linsanity in the US and Taiwanese contexts thus provides a rich and unique case that enables analysis of mediated constructions of ethnicity, nationalism, and identity in global media sports. By comparing media coverage of Linsanity in major US and Taiwanese newspapers, this article suggests that Lin had an ambivalent image in the US media, being simultaneously cast as a modern hero, and humble underdog with whom all Americans could identify, while also remaining a perpetual foreigner. On the other hand, coverage of Linsanity in the Taiwanese context was highly consistent, and Lin was portrayed and defended as a national hero who increased the nation’s global visibility. Consequently, the phenomenon of Linsanity can shed lights on the symbolic and meaning-making function of sports journalism, as well as the constant negotiation between the global and the local in the arena of media sports.