Media Writing Lab

MAKEUP TUTORIALS ON YOUTUBE: THE POWER OF EXPRESSION Jarrod stiver Youtube is one of the most popular social media platforms. Youtube is the most popular video sharing platform. This platform allows its users to access thousands of videos from many different genres online with one search. One genre that has been increasingly popular is beauty “vlogging,” or video blogging. Beauty vlogging is a way for the user to “ teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information” (p.1). While these videos are meant for the use of beautification, the producers and people in the vlogs tend to share very personal stories of their lives. By telling these stories, they are self-representing themselves to their viewers much like users of other social media platforms, like twitter and instagram. Kennedy says that beauty vlogging is unique due to the producer “not only presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the...

By Colleen Kelly Over the course of this week, a variety of both normative and non-normative sexual identities have been explored. While my focus on transgender identity in contemporary television is the last post in this series, this discussion is no way complete. It is vital that conversations about representation of gender and sexual identity continue beyond these five posts. Historically, transgender representation on television has been virtually non-existent. The few transgender characters we did see were typically episodic or peripheral characters (Capuzza & Spencer, 2017, p. 214). Having a transgender lead character was unthinkable until the premiere of All That Glitters in 1977 (Capuzza & Spencer, 2017, p. 215). I find it worth noting that All That Glitters only lasted a single season, likely because people were ambivalent about seeing a transgender person on television. Within the past decade, there has been a rather radical shift in the representation of transgend...

By: Sarah Selzer The straight population within American media is known for gaining and maintaining its power within television and film, and therefore have the dominance to change the cultural flow of society. Unfortunately, heteronormative plotlines are continually produced, neglecting the accurate representation of lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, and queer individuals within the entertainment industry. Straight people have the privilege of never having to worry about how they’re represented, but negative stereotypes of other sexual identities are still working their way up to the point where their stereotype does not solely represent their entire essence as a character. This notion is supported by social theorist Gail Dines with quote from her book Gender, race, and class in media: A critical reader : “While the entertainment industry have on some level acknowledged that gender and sexual identities are more fluid than was once thought, film and TV representations of ch...