Miss Representation: On the Media’s Disparaging Representations of Women
Featuring interviews from politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists, and academics like Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson and Gloria Steinem, the award-winning documentary Miss Representation aims to expose “how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America,” and to challenge “the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to...
Read MoreTop Posts of 2010: Scars, Stars, Sex, Satire, Students, and Social Networking
According to my blog stats, these are Unmuzzled Thoughts‘s 20 most visited posts of 2010. They are listed in order, #1 scoring the most hits this year. Looking at the posts collectively, I realize that some are not my favorite, some I should’ve worded differently, and some arguably should not have received as many hits as they did (e.g., “Weird Ohio”?!). However, together they do represent a nice spectrum of what this blog aims to do: 1) comment on the occasionally frustrating but always fascinating world of academia, and 2) critically examine trends, ideas, and themes...
Read MoreStudent Poll: How Many Names Do You Know?
To my film students and/or any other Millennials: If you have 30 seconds, please respond to the following poll. Your responses will greatly help me out for an essay I’m writing. Thanks! Dr. Marshall PS. Again, Millennials only, please! Which people/names do you recognize? (polls)
Read MoreWhy Millennials (and Others) Are Not Religious
Last night I began reading Lisa Miller’s Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. In the introduction, Miller summarizes the United States’s current views on religion and heaven. First, nearly 80% of Americans tell polsters they’re Christian – even though that word may be defined in completely different ways (Roman Catholic, liberal Protestant, Mormon, etc.). Second, 44% of Americans practice a religion different from the one they grew up with. Third, 65% of us believe that eternal salvation is attainable from many different spiritual paths. Fourth, right...
Read MoreSlipping Off That Pedestal: Shifts in the Student-Professor Relationship
This entry is part 10 of 32 in the series Essays / Analyses.When I was in college, both undergraduate and graduate school, this is what I knew about the personal lives of my professors: Many had cats; at least two had dogs. One spent most of her summers in Italy researching the letters of a sixteenth- (or maybe seventeenth-) century Italian woman. One smoked cigarettes, but only at home. One preached at my childhood church before his marriage went, ahem, awry. One adopted a child from another country. One loved Paris and the Moulin Rouge (the actual establishment; I’m not sure how he...
Read More’80s Remakes: Will Gen X Buy It?
My last post considers A.O. Scott’s column “Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis,” which posits that if pop culture is any indication of a generation’s status, (white) males of Generation X presently emerge as “losers” — men who are regretful, whiny, and tragically confined to their youth (e.g., Hot Tub Time Machine, Greenberg). How depressing. Over the past couple of days, I’ve thought more about Scott’s conclusions, asking myself why pop culture’s Gen X males (and females, Scott implies) are apparently “stuck in an earlier phase of life, which...
Read MoreGen X’s Midlife Crisis: For Men Only?
In his column “Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis,” NY Times film critic A.O. Scott considers the current state of Generation X as seen by popular culture. Through an analysis of three texts released in 2010 — the novel The Ask (Sam Lipsyte) and the movies Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink) and Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) — Scott summarizes what contemporary society apparently thinks about those of us born between 1965-1980: Our motto is that “we did what we could.” This is nothing like the dominant slogans of the Greatest Generation (“make do or do...
Read MoreBrokaw’s BOOMER$: Movers and Shakers, Consumers and Critics
This entry is part 12 of 22 in the series Reviews.I mentioned in a previous post on millennials that I have a thing for generational studies. It should come as no surprise, then, that I tuned in last week to the documentary Tom Brokaw Reports: Boomer$. Still airing on CNBC, Boomer$, as its name implies, explores the past and current states of the Baby Boom generation, those Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Here’s a teaser. Brokaw’s Boomer$ begins at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, about 40 minutes north of where I currently live (and a stone’s throw from the...
Read MoreWe’re All Winners and It’s Mister Rogers’s Fault: Pew Research, The Millennials, and the Classroom
I’ve been fascinated by generational studies ever since my husband brought home PowerPoint slides from “Introduction to Generations in the Workplace,” a presentation he attended about 6 or 7 years ago while working at the University of North Texas. According to my husband, the workshop was designed to introduce Student Affairs to the general characteristics of the generations with which they may be working and then to explain how such differences in age, objectives, work-habits, etc. may affect communication within their department. Unfortunately, I no longer have...
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Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,