Blog 8- Looking ahead to dissertations

In preparation for third year we have been asked to complete a dissertation proposal, which means knowing what we want to spend next year writing 10,000 words about.

Over the last 18 months I have had several ideas about what I could do for this, but each one I have dismissed shortly after thinking it.

I have decided to do my dissertation on cross cultural analysis of violence against women.  I wish to look at the different experiences of women in other cultures, and also look at the cultures in this country and how issues that some may not think are present here, in fact are. I also wish to consider the perceptions of this treatment within these cultures, whether it is behaviour that is common and acceptable, or whether it goes against the norms and is something that happens in private.  I want to consider the effects this has on women and if there is any research into how they feel about this.

Some themes that I have particular interest in that I wish to look at are female circumcision (or female genital mutilation) and also honour killings, as this is a frequent topic of news in this country, and female circumcision is something that many people do not expect to happen in the UK but it does happen, in some communities. 

I have undertaken some introductory research into female genital mutilation.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) the definition of female genital mutilation is 

"Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.” (2007)

WHO also states that FGM is: Known to be performed in 28 African countries, and several Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Some forms of the practice have been documented in some Central and South American countries.

The reaons for it can vary greatly.  Some women of the upper class in Paris choose to be circumcised because it increases sexual pleasure, although it is against the law in France some hospitals carry out the operation

Other reasons aren't necessarily by personal choice. Non-excised girls often ridiculed and ostracised and unexcised girls will stand no chance of marriage (Dorkenoo, 1994 :35)

As for occurrences in the UK, it is estimated that 74,000 women in have undergone FGM and 7000 girls under the age of 6 are at high risk (Dept. for Education and Skills, DOH, 2007).

Dorkenoo, E. (1994) Cutting the Rose- Female Genital Mutilation: The practice and its prevention. London: Minority Rights

World Health Organisation 2007

Blog 7- Berlin

On the 11th of April, I took part in a visit to Berlin with the university. Whilst it was only a short visit, it was a really interesting and educational experience.
Having never been to Germany, I had no idea what to expect.  And having never been abroad with school, college or university, I didn't know what to expect from that side of things.
However,  both areas exceeded any expectations I could have had!

Whilst there we filled our days with tours including the Berlin Dom Cathedral, and the Memorial for the murdered Jews, which was a little emotional to say the least.  We walked for what felt like forever at times, attempted to figure out the trains, and explored East and West Berlin.

On the first evening, we went and explored a local club, which was possibly the best place I've ever been to in my entire life.  Possible exaggeration there, but it was pretty good.  When we first got inside, i wasn't overly impressed, a small room with a bar- looked pretty standard to me.  But then that room led to another room, and to 2 more, and 3 more, and then... there was a pool. A pool? Yes. Why? I honestly have no idea.   But I was amazed. Needless to say, that was a very fun night- but we didn't go for a swim.

The second evening we stayed with a big group and went and ventured on the train to explore the gay bar district.  We were told that some bars would not let us ladies in as they were exclusively for men!  After my outrage, we found a small bar that would let us in, however, for some reason when we arrived the bar very quickly emptied.  I'm sure there was no coincidence.  People just realised they all had to be somewhere. Or they told their friend they would meet them.. Or something!!

When it came to the last day, we all decided to travel together and visit Charlottenburg castle.  However, after taking  an hour to be served food, most of the group lost all energy and motivation, after the 2 long days previously.  So we opted for not moving and drinking cocktails. I blame Trish completely, but a wise decision I'm sure you'll agree, and a perfect way to end our 3 day trip.

So, New York next year? 

Blog 6- Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 and rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6billion search queries per day.

Twitter is the preferred social media site for many, including celebrities, who want to share SMS-type messages with a multitude of people worldwide.  
However, whatever its original intended function and purpose, Twitter is becoming much more than just a site where individuals share trivial daily thoughts.  Twitter is fast becoming many people's main source of news and updates of major global events.
https://blog.twitter.com/2008/twitter-news-wire
Because of the rate at which people across the world tweet and share information, it is very often the first place news is discovered, before most people get the chance to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television, they have already had 'x' amount of updates that can now even be accessed on the go on a phone- making it even quicker and easier to get information.


Twitter is not only useful for news and entertainment purposes, but also can be used as part of research.  Whilst in class, we were shown how to complete searches to find recently tweeted or trending information related to what we were researching, such as "women's rights", and then you can follow pages and link them to your news feed on Tweet deck. 
This can be a really useful tool for finding information, it comes to your direct, and it can be very quick and convenient.  It is making use of one of the most popular social networking sites for academic purposes, and so is a new and modern way of researching.
However, for the average person, and including myself, it can be confusing to set up and start the searches, and then save them, and follow them, and link them, and and and.... etc! I think this is something that perhaps puts off a lot of people from using this method- if it seems to hard, or you aren't sure what to do, there's always Google!

http://www.russellwebster.com/qualitativeresearch-using-social-media-for-social-research/
The author of this blog discusses using Twitter actually as part of social research, as a modern alternative to questionnaires or surveys, for example, as the character limit on tweets prevents answers being too long but allows for some more meaning and information.  I found this to be a really interesting concept, to combine two things together in such a way that could provide interesting results.

Blog 5- Group work update

After selecting my chosen magazine of Women's Health, I have undertaken further analysis and highlighted key themes and issues relating to our research question.
As a group we have discussed the themes that have risen and decided to link our research to theorists such as Rich, Gauntlett and Butler.

We have decided to examine certain aspects of the magazines, such as the number of sexual images, or topics on pages for example, and collate the data into graphs that can be easily read and presented on our final posters.

However, Women's Health has come to be a point of contrast, as it hasn't fit the framework for our graphs.

Women's Health magazine is one magazine, like Shout, that we looked at for comparative analysis, as we did not come to the same conclusions.
The magazine is primarily a health and well-being magazine aimed at women to help them 'feel great about themselves'.
One theorist who discusses issues in women's magazines is Gauntlett (2008) who suggests that there is a 'common assumption that women's magazines are all about "How to get a man"', and this is something we have found in our research so far.
Whilst not a dominant feature in Women's Health it is certainly present, although only in a few features, and so supporting the idea of normative heterosexuality.
The are pages dedicated to knowing how to please your man, based on a typical heterosexual image, with women perfecting themselves to appeal to men.
Similar to the other magazines analysed, Women's Health contains no examples of sexuality in any other sense, such as homosexual. In contrast to the other magazines, it contains significantly less sexual imagery and content.  There were in fact no examples of sexual images however there were only two examples of sexual topics in articles.

Reasons to explain this contrast between portrayals of sexuality in the magazines could be explained by class, and barriers that are created within the styles. Women's Health seems to be a magazine that is aimed more at middle class females.  The language used in the main articles and the content of the magazine supports this, with no trivial gossip sections and advertisements for particular health and sports products that are relatively expensive.

Reference:
Gauntlett, D. (2008) Media, Gender and Identity. London: Routledge

Further reading:
Moran, C. Lee, C. (2010) On His Terms: Representations of sexuality in women's magazines and the implications for negotiating safe sex, Psychology and Sexuality, 2011 Volume 2, Issue 2:159-180
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble London: Routledge
Rich, A. (1980) Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Signs, Volume 5, Issue 4: 631-660

Blog 4- Beginning group work

Within our group we have been tasked with deciding a topic on which we shall form a research question and produce a poster with our findings and conclusions.

I was a late addition to my group, but it now consists of Deborah England, Kerry Williams, Kirstie Blaik, Kristian Leech and myself.

When I joined the group, the question had already been decided, however, this suited me well as the topic is something I have been interested in throughout the course of my two years as an undergraduate sociology student. The question decided on was: To what extent is heterosexuality portrayed as the only legitimate form of sexuality in various forms of media including film, TV and magazines?

I have found it very interesting exploring  the effects media has on society and the extraordinary power it holds over us all in some form.  I also produced a presentation in my first year which featured issues of sexuality and women's portrayal in the media and I felt this topic was a step on from this.

After discussion, it was decided that this would be quite vague and too broad of a question for us to answer, and in the time we had available.

So as a result, the question was narrowed down to just magazines, which we felt was a good choose of media to analyse.

A selection of magazines were chosen to be analysed with varied styles and target audiences.  An alternative magazine, a men's magazine, a stereotypical women's magazine, a teen magazine and Women's Health.

Newsstand.co.uk provides this description of what the magazine is:

If you’ve ever felt that you want to live a healthy life but don’t quite know how, then we recommend a copy of this magazine immediately. Written in a familiar, friendly style, Women’s Health magazine covers love, life, food, exercise and fashion. There’s almost no need to have any other magazines, this one has got you covered in every walk of life.

Nowadays living is a full-time occupation. Wait a minute, don’t laugh, we’re not being ridiculous. Whereas in the past people seemed to have just existed, care-free, not worrying about calories, exercise or getting their five a day, in modern times you can barely move for advice on how to live your life. But is this having any effect?

Recently there was some news that suggested that the first person to live to two hundred years old had likely already been born. It is certainly true that medical science has advanced wonderfully, bringing cures to diseases and extending our natural lifespan through to almost 80. That’s a far cry from medieval times, when anyone over 50 was considered a venerable fellow.

Living right means a lot of different things to different people. Eating healthily, exercising and many other factors all play their part. But what magazines such as Women’s Health allow you to do is live your life so that you enjoy it and feel great about yourself. After all, who doesn’t want to look as fantastic as Kate Beckinsale at 38, or Orlando Bloom at 35 (where has the time gone?)? Grab a copy of Women’s Health and feel good about yourself as you change your lifestyle for the better!

Although we narrowed the question down to just cover magazines, if time permits it could be interesting and useful to examine other sources, such as films and literature as a point of comparison, as there is a considerable amount of research on heterosexuality in books alone.

I am very much looking forward to working on the project with this group, as I know that each member is a hard worker and will put in a lot of effort.  I anticipate that we may encounter some issues along the way but I suspect this will mainly be finding time outside of allocated class time to meet and work on the poster.

Blog 3- Blog on Blogs

For my third blog, I have been set the task to find a blog somewhere in the whole of the internet that particularly interests me, appeals to me, or just is an example of a really successful blog.

So, first step, find a blog that somehow stands out from the others...

Ok, step one done.

Whilst I am relatively new to the blogging scene, and I wouldn't normally choose to read blogs of people's daily ramblings of their lives, or offering me reviews of recent products (or whatever it is people blog about!), this blog caught my eye: http://www.jagsfitnessblog.com/

In this blog, "Jag" documents and tracks her weight loss journey, with regular updates via photos how far she has come since starting.  Although it's a full time commitment, she mainly writes about her feelings and how happy she is with her results, not just sharing with the readers the number of press ups she can do, or the weight she can dead lift.

Having spent some time with a friend of mine recently, I am beginning to become more open-minded about exercising. I'm not opposed to it of course, but when you can go online and see the 'obsessed' people, taking photographs of themselves daily, counting each calorie and weighing each cornflake, then I've had some issues.

[Read on a little further into the blog: "obsessed is a word used by the lazy to describe the dedicated"... Well, that's me told, can't argue with her there..!]

I met this friend of mine almost 3 years ago now, and in 2010, it was safe to say he was very slim. Some may say skinny, but to me, he was just 'slim'.  He never expressed any interest in exercise as such, and never really commented on his body. Fast forward over 2 years later, and he's talking to me about all the latest workout crazes- P90X2, Insanity, and I'm sure there are plenty more.  I took one look at the over enthusiastic muscle clad people taking part in these regimes and claiming the life changing results they had experienced, and rolled my eyes. How many times do we see this? The perfectly built, attractive, confident (and all those other things we really hate and don't want to be..) individual selling us this product or idea to make our bodies into these beautiful temples.  But is this just false advertisement? Are we being encouraged to aim for the unobtainable body ideal that only those with all the time in the world and damn good genetics can achieve?

But questions for me still remain: what is it all for, and what are we aiming for?  According to Germov and Williams (1996) women and females from the age of eleven report dissatisfaction with their bodies, and spend most of their lives on some sort of diet because of feeling the need to lose weight despite being in a healthy weight range.
They drew the following hypotheses from their study:

1. Most women perpetuate and reinforce the thin ideal through surveillance of other women.
2. Size accepting women have actively rejected the thin ideal in response to past experience with dieting.
3. For women, weight loss as a result of illness is rewarded.
4. The influence of health professionals and health promotion is unrelated to the desire of women to lose weight.
5. In respect of dieting to lose weight, women's attitudes cut across socio-economic barriers.


So is there any instances where women and of course men as well want to lose weight for their own positive reasons, and is there a way to do this in a way that is considered healthy and acceptable in society?

After reading this particular study, I found myself disagreeing with some of their findings and hypotheses, which leads me to think perhaps I am not so against weight loss and exercising as I first thought.  I think I am more open minded than I perhaps acknowledge at times, as I think there are health ways to lose weight and positive reasons for wanting to do so.  If I stop to think and take that big old sociological hat off then there has to be more to wanting to lose weight than the reasons I have read.  I'm sure there is some degree of unhappiness with images of the self, but I am also just as sure that people aren't losing weight just to conform to ideals.

However, it can't be ignored that there is obviously a big problem with media influence and pressure on individuals to conform to the fit ideals, and was it not Malcolm X who claimed the media is the most powerful entity on earth?  Therefore the problem that needs to be tackled, once again, in the media.  

Show of hands who thinks that's possible....





"I don’t lift weights to make myself aesthetically pleasing for you."

Blog 2- Autoethnography

Eating habits: Taste or Symbol?

Autoethnography is considered to be writing that is ethnographical and autobiographical at the same time.  According to Ellis and Bochner (2000), autoethnographies are autobiographies that self-consciously explore the interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history and ethnographic explanation.

I will take this approach to discuss my own personal eating habits; what I consider acceptable to eat, and whether this is an opinion I have developed from my own experiences, or views that are constructed socially and culturally.

In theory, the majority of common land mammals are edible, and also most fish.  However, certain animals seem to hold a certain stigma over them, or are considered controversial, and those who eat such foods are adventurous or daring.

Throughout my life, I have not been one of these adventurous or daring individuals; I have only been willing to try food that looks a certain way and is aesthetically pleasing.

I regularly eat chicken and pork, and occasionally beef, which in my opinion are three of the most commonly eaten meats.  I have more recently begun to eat more fish, including cod, haddock, mackeral, tuna and salmon, and have tried squid, which seems to be coming increasingly common to eat.  Whilst I only eat a small selection of meats, I consider many more to be edible, but I have particular feelings and opinions about some of these.

Animals such as horses, lambs, rabbit and deer, for example, are ones that from a young age, many people have an interest in and will pet, etc.  I think this may have initially led to my aversion from eating these animals, and as I have gotten older I have developed my opinions on this matter.  Once we learn that these animals produce meats that we eat, it seems this may be a point at which stigma becomes attached for some.

Whilst I may not wish to eat these, I can fully appreciate that many other individuals do and this is perfectly acceptable.  However, if in years to come, there were limited amounts of the meats that I prefer, I would consider trying other meats, but after 22 years, my pre-conceptions and feelings towards these may take precedence and I may convince myself that I do not like them.  I often feel that if I was unable to eat chicken (the most common meat in my diet) I would prefer to become a vegetarian and eat meat free or meat replacement foods.

How food looks is particular concern to me.  For example, if the food on plate plate in any way resembles the animal it came from, I feel uncomfortable to eat it, such as a whole or half chicken. the thought of an animal carcass sat on my plate is particularly unsettling with me, and eating fish then finding I'm chomping on a bone is one sure-fire way to put me off my food.

In terms of society, and ideals held within the society we live in, it seems apparent that people's preferences to eat meats such as chicken, beef, pork, etc. may stem from the advertising and selling methods in shops.  these meats are readily available in shops and when walking around the average supermarket, you'd have to look hard for 'different' meats to be advertised.

One major issue raised with this is when we consider the future when we carry on this way.  If these meats are advertised most, and purchased more often by people, in the future are these going to be the most readily available if we continue to consume them at the same rate? And if not, are stores going to have to start advertising alternative meats, and people like myself stop turning up our noses to the thought of this?

The alternative? We all become vegetarians and save the animals we have, and consider more than just what we want.