bell hooks' "Seeing and Making Culture" bell hooks successfully challenges stereotypes specific to poverty by writing to two separate audiences using ethos, pathos and vocabulary common enough for most people, yet elegant enough for academics. In her essay, "Seeing and Making Culture," hooks uses an ethos way of writing when she uses quotes throughout the text. In addition, hooks also uses pathos by appealing to our emotions with the interactions between herself and her grandmother. She successfully writes a narrative that many audiences can response to and appreciate such as the lower class "common folks," and the more educated upper middle class and academics. In this regard, hooks gives voice to an enormous group of people she claims remain voiceless in modern American society, the poor. When she was growing up, hooks states that everyone they knew fell into one of four general categories; destitute, working poor, middle class and affluent. The working poor were able to barely make ends meet and although no one in her family actually talked about it, all of the children of the family just "knew" the family was poor. For instance, hooks states, "We never talked about being poor. As children, we knew we were not supposed to see ourselves as poor but we felt poor" (p. 234). Being poor, though, was not regarded by hooks' family and friends as being lazy or worthless; it just meant that she had less money than others. According to hooks, "Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody's value could be measured by material standards. . . . One could be hardworking and still be poor" (p. 234). Moreover, education did not necessarily equate to being smart: "One could have degrees and still not be intelligent or honest" (p. 235). Indeed, it was not until hooks removed herself from this enlightened environment in favor of the halls of academia that she learned anything different about being poor. Rather than being a condition that results from the well-entrenched social strata that divide America into the haves and have-nots, hooks was taught in college that poverty was the fault of the poor. In an impassioned response to these experiences, hooks writes, "I was shocked by representations of the poor learned...
They almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy" (p. 235).
Visual Culture Exam Mobilizing Shame For a very long time now, people have perceived shame as a feeling of embarrassment, inadequacy, or the feeling that prevails after someone has done something, which a given society believes is wrong. However, shame can mean something else; it only depends on the perspective it is viewed. Therefore, shame is brining or exposing something to the public, for the public to critic, and allow social transformation.
The only thing that is missing is the freedom to make that choice, the freedom to do it without pain or sacrifice. But freedom always comes with a price, especially for women. In the process of gaining her choice, Ada loses a finger, loses her piano, and almost loses her life. We have to also look at history in the film. The Piano seems historically correct because women didn't have
Photography and Images Our Memory, Our Identity, Our Reality: The Affects of Photography "In teaching us a new visual code, photography alters and enlarges our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing." ~Susan Sontag, On Photography "Hence it is essential that any theoretical discussion of the relationship of black life to the visual, to
Love Modern America lacks a true love ethic. Writers like M. Scott Peck and Bell Hooks argue that our confusion about love stems from an inability to see love as an action rather than a noun, and the confusion of romance and sex with love. Instead, they argue that true love is based on choice and the desire to nurture the self or another spiritually. Hooks specifically argues that much of our
Women's Oppression, Racism, Colonialism And Feminism "The Committee is concerned that women's access to justice is limited, in particular because of women's lack of information on their rights, lack of legal aid, the insufficient understanding of the convention by the judiciary and the lengthy legal processes which are not understood by women. The Committee is concerned that physical and psychological violence cases are particularly difficult to be prosecuted in the legal
Introduction While Nixon may not represent or symbolize the height of the Cold War, he does represent an era in American history plagued by government corruption and large-scale public dissatisfaction with the government in general. Nixon came to power on the heels of four politically motivated assassinations: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and MLK, Jr., and RFK in 1968. Robert Kennedy had been running against Nixon in the 1968
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