Humanities Homework Help

Advertising and the Body: This is your first assignment. For this assignment, you are asked to watch the video Killing Us Softly 4 by Jean Kilbourne. After viewing the video, look through recent popular magazines, hardcopies or on the Internet, and see if you can find advertisements that objectify women in order to sell a product. Or watch some TV commercials or browse the Internet or YouTube for some current ads (from 2010 onwards). You can look for beer commercials; commercials for food, chocolate; shoes; cars; perfume; detergents or any house cleaning products, etc. Study these images (or image) in the context you have chosen (ex: Canadian, US, European etc), then write a short paper (about 2-4 pages, double spaced) about how advertising objectifies women in order to sell products, and how this objectification creates “the sexualization of culture.” Try to see if the ad constructs a representation that reflects the politics of the context in which it appears: are the objectifications reproduced in your ad also recurrent in the social-political context of the day? If yes, how can such phenomenon be explained? You might want to revisit here one of the feminist dictums “the personal is political” in order to think how to underscore the critique of your ad in the political context discussed. An ad is never just a representation of a product, or an image that is meant to entertain; it is rather a manifestation (creation, production, circulation) of a social and / or political sentiment of its time.

Please remember to use a formal academic structure: introduction, thesis, main body of argument(s) and conclusion. Any citation style is fine, as long as it is consistently and correctly used throughout the paper.

This assignment asks you to go one step further, by examining the influence of advertising on you personally and your self-worth, but also how you believe advertising affects other women and  men. Include your ad with your essay.