Summary of Terms / Artifacts

For two of my artifacts, I chose to use my personal intersectionality as one of my artifacts as well as my personal experience with race and culture that I uniquely grew up with in my life. In it, I explain my unique intersectionality by describing my "race" / ethnicities, my gender, my gender preference, as well as my privilege in relation to these.  I also explain my unique childhood in regards to race, ethnicity, and culture. My next artifact I look at the heteronormative narrative and oppression that goes along with not fitting into this narrative in our society. For this I used two of my friends Instagram posts about each other and one of my friends was taking a poll, asking if my other friend was "gay" for watching a tv show. Another artifact has to do with the social construction of masculinity, specifically tied to male bodies. In this artifact, I look at an Instagram add that is advertising and app that allows males to edit their pictures. It goes through and plays a video of a man at the beach with his shirt off with no abs and no muscles. The add proceeds to show how you can edit a six-pack onto your stomach and muscles onto your arms, really driving home the pressures and social construction of what a "mans" "body" should or is supposed to look like. My next artifact, I talk about racial injustice, which was a reoccurring theme in a view of my artifacts, however, I specifically focus on police, police brutality, and the statistics behind the different races and their encounters with police and the use of force in comparison by race. This shed light on how the use of force when looking at the ratio of force proportionally to the number of people in a given race, and these findings are not equal by any means. My next artifact, I dissect Colin Kaepernick's protest about racial injustice and tie in how intertwined the different responses were when you look at white privilege as a factor. In this artifact, I talk about how systemic the responses are rooted in racism, as well as slavery. My next artifact, I look at one of my favorite tv shows called "Friends", and how one episode, in particular, relates to gender norms, gender fluidity and social construction of masculinity. My next artifact I look at my favorite genre of music, rap, and how they continue to objectify women at an increasing rate. I talk about the societal negative effects that are caused by this "rap culture". In my next artifact, I look into one of the most influential African American athletes in the history of sports and discuss how race relations have trended negatively, especially over the past ten years. In the following artifact, I look at a racially charged tweet and discuss how the rise and technology and specifically social media has negatively affected race relations. These are all of my artifacts loosely summarized due to not wanting to spoil too much of my specific and individualized blog posts. This class has opened my eyes to so many different views and I used this project to talk about issues and the terms that mean the most to me and that I feel have benefitted me as a well rounded and educated citizen.