day 8 meeting #4

Today's discussion was also quite wide-ranging, but it ultimately focused on representation in media. Beginning with the new Western movie Magnificent Seven, we discussed how race and LGBTQ+ issues are represented in the media/Hollywood. How do these portrayals affect real world issues - that is, are these portrayals generally negative or positive, and how is either applicable to real-world experiences of people? We also talked about the pitfalls of furthering one-dimensional stereotypes/tropes in media. 

To prepare for this meeting, I had researched broadly on gender (it is a spectrum + gender and biological sex are not synonymous), learned something new (existence/recognition by Supreme Courts of hijras in Southeast Asia), gender and law (HB2, DOMA/Equal Nondiscrimination Act, Canada’s Law on Commission's definition of a relationship, and other specific cases in history including the Kansas Supreme Court's judgment in the J’Noel case; Ulane v. Eastern Airlines, Inc; the Schwenk court’s interpretation of Title VII), and the definitions of legal scrutiny.

In order to build on this research, I will now turn to Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History to study the construction of gender in history (in other words, more socially/politically, less legally). Additionally, I (and Mrs. Lawson) am (are) interested in the way imperialism is highly gendered. Scott may discuss this in her book, but if not, I will be looking into it myself. A side note may be how globalization is affected by gender (and vice versa).