"Big Love" Increasing Visibility of Utah Politics

I'm not sure what to write about this yet but hopefully I will be inspired soon.

Propaganda, Humor, and Identity

An uprising of anti-choice billboards in Atlanta has renewed dialogues about an old argument that abortion providers target women of color. While anti-choicers have been getting off on this holocaust fantasy for decades, does it still smell fresh to the massive majority of Americans who are not generally conscious of the ins and outs of anti-/pro-choice fads?

I pored over blog discussions to try to get a glimpse of how this latest incarnation has fared in public opinion, but of course I could only find stale blah-blah from both sides. What do the billboards mean to the millions of women and families who are not personally, politically or professionally embroiled in the abortion debates? I doubt that both sides only intend to antagonize each other, so pro-choicers and anti-choicers alike presumably want to impact this massive middle. So what effects does this type of media--in this case, propaganda--have?

Let me make clear, I don't want to study the effectiveness of various propaganda strategies of each side in terms of reducing unplanned parenting or preventing abortions. That is a significant and massive topic, but it is not quite what I am thinking about.

As a media studies student, I want to explore how media helps us determine who we are and who we belong with--identity. In the case of pro-choice and anti-choice media, how do we use (by consuming, creating and spreading) various propaganda--like these billboards--to understand ourselves and those around us?

Furthermore, what about media that grows outside of the sloganized pro-/anti-choice debate? What about "dead baby jokes", which became popular (to my utter delight) when I was finishing college in 2003? Is this brand of humor an attempt to reject both pro-choice and anti-choice propaganda? What power and pleasure does someone get from this humor? As for me, I was flipping off the women's studies crones who were grading my thesis as well as the hyper-controlled phraseology of my Planned Parenthood career. What might my clinic coworkers think about my dead baby jokes? In reverse, what would my college friends think of the different but equally barbaric humor my coworkers and I employed to survive the emotional drain of our work? And God forbid Planned Parenthood Federation of America should find out that their clinic staff in Colorado Springs were laughing it up at the potential expense of "the mission"? Can I belong to all three groups, college friends, clinic staff, and international NGO? Do I have to hide one part of my identity in order to honor another part?

Okay, back to the billboard to wrap it up with some questions. What happens when different people see the billboard? What happens when two people see it at the same time and share their reaction? Do they identify with each other further because they react similarly to this bit of media? Do they disagree with each other and discover a split they weren't aware of before? What are the consequences of discovering this bond or this split?

Motives, Inspiration and Mills

My primary motive for pursuing media studies is to explore relationships between popular culture and sexual health issues which can include, for example, teen and unplanned pregnancy, queer identities, monogamy, sex taboos and attitudes about sex in the public, private and professional spheres. My interest in this broad scope of issues began as a women's studies major reading identity and lingual theorists like Judith Butler and Audre Lorde. Then the inspiration quickly became practical as I began an internship at Planned Parenthood where I then worked for three years. Being situated in Colorado Springs made my experience of working in sexual health far more controversial than if I had been in my native New York City, and so the location had everything to do with understanding the severe disconnects between public messaging and private realities.

In Colorado the billboards, television ads, bumper stickers, pamphlets and even newspapers push abstinence and strong anti-abortion messages weighted by (alleged) Christian values. The images and words are violent and the air around them is dangerous, imposing and even threatening. These media--condoned and extolled by communities, politicians, schools and even medical professionals--create a morally and spiritually righteous and, more importantly, highly aspirational world. Yet still, my experience at Planned Parenthood seemed to highlight an enormous gap between these aspirations set forth by various media and the tragic consequences when people failed to achieve them.

My studies had shown me that many realities can coexist, that trying to define identities in finite compartmentalized terms is at the very least a disappointing endeavor, and that isolating public from private as if they do/should not intersect yields inaccurate perspectives and experiences of both. I want to apply these intellectual theories to understanding and describing the relationships between media--mass, sub-culture, youth, political etc.--and sexual health, in the United States and abroad.

In regards to the Mills article, I most appreciated how he lays out the importance of meeting your audience and avoiding abstract jargon without completely sacrificing technical language when it is useful. I'm turned off by elusive hard to describe theories and texts, so it was heartening to read a respected "-ology" scholar describe good writing as writing that your reader can imagine being spoken; claim that difficult to understand terminology and concepts don't always equate with smarter or more complex ideas; and that you should try to write as if you have information that your audience needs to know, as simple as that sounds. I was not sure about Mills' description of how your intended meaning and the audience's interpretation should ideally match perfectly because I don't think an audience is either controllable, passive or static, their motives to listen to and use your data are unknown, and context changes faster and faster as communication gains speed.

Maybe I misinterpreted that part of Mills and he broke it down somewhere else in the article?

Does this dead mouse "mouse" have anything to do with media studies? Probably not, or not without a lot of conceptual conjecturing, but it's pretty good. Especially to all my vegetarian/vegan coworkers to whom I just emailed it. They'll get it, and if they don't get it they should learn to get it. Jerks.