Final Wrap Up

Before taking this class I had a general idea/ opinion of each key terms of Gender, Race, Class, and Media.  After taking this class, I now have different understandings on these three terms and how they all tie into media.  I looked at all of the ideas as just broad terms that affect our everyday life in some way.  Gender was just what we were born into, race is what you live by, and class is the status in which you associate yourself with.  Through this class I now see how media takes each of these to the extreme and it makes you think even harder on what they really mean to you as a person.  Both my gender and race are affected tremendously through media seeing that I am a black female.  In this class the two topics that stuck with me the most were advertising and pornography, and in these two being a female it is portrayed very negative.  In advertising women are sexualized as objects.  In porn, women are treated negative, and black women even more so are treated as animals.  Before I learned this from this class I took my gender and my race both lightly because these things were not brought to my attention.  What I learned from class is that classes are treated differently in media depending on the race.  From one of the activities that we did during the first week of class it was an eye opener to me to see how people view class differently.  What may be working class for someone may not be for another.
I have learned a lot from this class of how media portrays life in a very negative way.  There really isn't anything positive that is pulled from media which I don;t necessarily feel is a bad things but I think pointing out positives could be useful at times as well.  I say useful because learning everything in this class has given me a outlook on life which makes me a lot more cautious to the media that I am consuming.

. Dines, G. & Humez, J. (Eds.), Gender, Race and Class in Media. (second edition) Location: Thousand Oaks,CA: Sage.