IMS 103 Assignment Blog

Advertising:
-advertising acts like language
-ads make certain assumptions about how item being sold might function in life
-bird is often a word used for women.
-women's bodies are used to sell all sorts of things; bahamas ad
-dress ad: assume world is white, upper class, heterosexual (or wants to be)
-women need to be desperately thin, and very young (and even to point of dressing like young kids)
-new trend: shows women being physically active, even sweating.
-look at ads to see how often women are shown being reflected or being watched by men; used to be common in 70s and early 80s.
–guess ad campaign: images of rape and battery. designed for girls around 13.
-jackhammer ad: jackhammers are phallic, and the guy is looking at woman's mid thighs, not his feet.
-have to be white to sell beauty
-we live in a world where sex has been eroticized, yet when you try to talk about it, people are incredibly quiet

The Dolls (Jacki Kari):
First, the sestina form defined:

sestina –SIS-TEA-NAH (It: sistine, sesta rima) A highly complicated verseform practiced by troubadours which is composed of six stanzas each containing six lines often with a three-line envoy. Instead of rhyme, the use of repeated words from the end lines of the beginning stanza are used in progressively reversed patterns. If the numbers 1 –6 represent the six end words of the first stanza, the sestina uses the following pattern.
stanza 1: 123456
stanza 2: 615243
stanza 3: 364125
stanza 4: 532614
stanza 5: 451326
stanza 6: 246531
envoy: 531 or 135

It’s interesting that this poem is in a very strict form, yet the form itself seems to be liberating for describing conventions in the poem.

Notes about the poem:
-the girls are trying to be doll-like
-the little girl is chasing her way into the life of older girls
-the beads are like a “bride price” – in that the boyfriend of the mother is molesting the girls and giving them beads (to keep their silence, maybe?)
-it’s a cycle that can’t be broken. The mother remembers seeing what’s happening to her daughters happen to her sister, and although she’s trying to give her girls a better life, she’s really just reinforcing the cycle
-when they flirt with boys, the girls are participating in conventional forms that do violence to them
-the poem is a critique of a form, yet the poem itself uses a strict form