2.07.2012

In Summary....


The article that we read, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is just an extension of what we learned in Codes of Gender, which are both laced with the ideas of Erving Goffman.  In the article, it is mentioned that The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life describes social actions in relationship to how actors perform on a stage.

In relation to the Codes of Gender video, I think that out of the main concepts that Goffman describes in his article that manner and appearance encompass the ideas presented in Codes of Gender.
The concept of Appearance portrays the to the audience the social statuses of the performer. He says that appearance also tells us that dress and props serve to communicate gender, status, occupation, age, and personal commitments.  Appearance was often a focal point in Codes of Gender, because props and dress identify actors in the ads to us. Therefore we recognize the appearances attributed to each gender and how they are used to marker ads to a particular audience or are made to make the audience relate/ feel emotions about the advertisements. Even more so, I think that even Appearance can go even further in the direction of not only dress and props, but even inherent physical traits as well.  In stage and screen acting, actors who often look naturally like the part that the appearance is being ascribed to often are more accepted to the audience. The more that a person fills out a social role ( especially that of appearnce) the more there are accepted in any society.

In the article, Goffman presents the idea of Manner, or how an individual play the role and functions to warn the audience of how the performer will act or seek to act in a role. As example, Goffman says that adjectives like dominant, aggressive, receptive. Goffman also says that Manner can have inconsistencies and can be contradictory, when one does not present him or her self or behave in accordance to his social status or position. This was projected in the video when the ads of men in women’s usual advertising positions seemed to us as weird or unnatural.  Goffman also says that our appearance and manners are often contradictory, when was also apparent in the film, when the clip from the video showed the different ways in which the man was walking.  Even though the man performed the ultra masculine walk of John Wayne, he still was in controversy with his appearance with his already perceived femininity.

No comments:

Post a Comment