Racialized Disgust

To make my video, I tied together ideas from the key words, the Phillips reading, and my final project topic that involves white privilege and female privilege.   I used images of Hope Solo and Ray Rice that were contrasting to show the difference between men’s hardness and women’s softness.  I then paired this with two news clips that talked about each of the incidences.  Ray Rice was harshly ridiculed, while there seemed to be a media blackout when it came to Hope Solo’s charges.  Finally, I paired this with texts from the Phillips article, which helps explain gender stereotypes and how they form society’s expectation of men and women.

First, the word for the week was disgust, which is described as a “structured and agonistic emotion,” is formed by society and the ideologies that are created by the circulation of media.  The image and idea of a strong man hitting a defenseless women is disgusting to most of the viewers.  However, a women hitting a women or a woman hitting a man is much less disgusting because it has not been a part of a structure in society.  These ideas and images we think about are created by society and can create structural inequalities by creating a way of thinking that allows for white privilege.

This connects with the “Dicks Dicks Dicks” reading by Phillips.  She describes masculinity as “hard” in all aspects, and the reasoning for this “hardness” is a expectation from society of what a man should look and act like.  I added this to my video because this idea perfectly ties together the structural inequality with societies views and expectations of men and women.

Lastly, my topic for my final project is to discuss white privilege and how it effects our society.  White privilege creates structured inequalities through inferential racism.  For example, the way Hope Solo’s violence was talked about was far less severe and grotesque than Ray Rice.  This rhetoric is important because it creates and shapes how society view genders and races.  In this case it is perpetuating white privilege and furthering the structured inequality between race and gender.