Question 5

Ideology is the common sense of our society, and hegemony covers all things that create and maintain ideologies. This comes from the super ego, the institutions that build who we are. In this case the institution is a public restroom. As one learns from playing The Urinal Game, men are not supposed to stand next to each other while at the urinal. The Urinal Game then becomes the hegemony to maintain the ideology that it is wrong to stand next to someone at the urinal. I have heard this ideology before, and hidden in the meaning is the insecurity of men. This ideology may signify that men are not comfortable with their masculinity and sexuality, because if a man breaks this common rule, he may be viewed as a homosexual.

Question 3

Both of these videos use a lower-class black representation, and both view them as lazy. For example, in "Ghetto Delta," it shows a black man lounging in the plane "gettin' [his] drink on," and the black man in the Everest College advertisement tells the audience (which appears to be his black friends) that "you spend all day on the phone anyhow." However, the "Ghetto Delta" video is intentionally racist, and exhibits extreme stereotypes of body types, attitudes, likes, and speech. The Everest College advertisement in unintentionally racist as it promotes higher education, but at the same type characterizes the working class black male.

Question 2

Audience fallacies are generalizations, stereotypes, and/or assumptions about a group of people (like your intended audience) with no evidence; for example, "Americans want to be wealthy." This is probably true about many Americans, but certainly not all. Authorial fallacies are when you blame a corporation/business for its message. For example, a company's latest marketing campaign might have racist signifiers, but the company probably didn't purposefully create a racist campaign. The focus should not be on what the company intended, but rather how the product/marketing can be interpreted by others. Both of these fallacies make an argument less valid and more offensive.

Question 1

Cultural studies theorists capitalize words to signify their meaning and representation. "Woman" defines the idea of being a woman, not literally a woman herself. For example, the scholar bell hooks de-capitalized her name to remove the "idea" of bell hooks and her importance. The capitalization makes the word a connotation instead of a denotation, because one needs to understand the socially-constructed meaning behind the word.

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