viz. - Visual Rhetoric

Year's Recap

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 19:22:19 +0000

My colleagues have listed their own top picks from this year's array of insights an analyses. You'll notice a few repeats on my list--a sure sign of their success--but I'll admit, choosing a representative sample is a hard task. We should all go back and reread the blog, just in case...

Without further preamble, then, here are my favorite posts of 2014-2015:

Rhiannon's "Taste vs. Enjoyment." I'm sure any grad student will identify with Rhiannon's opening observation that books on her nightstand fall into two piles: "those which we should read and those which we want to read." As someone who also works on less-canonized texts, the "taste vs. enjoyment" tension is particularly fraught--especially because, as Rhiannon says, most of our opinions about "good taste" are really just thin perceptions.

Casey Sloan's "Moving Targets: Player Choice and the Politics of Bioshock: Infinite." Casey guest-wrote this post for me, and I'm delighted to be able to endorse it again. I don't know a lot about video games, but I was totally sold by Casey's reading, which looks at the scripting of the game to explicate "an unwillingness on the part of game's designers to commit to any single motivation for the character." Omitting the nuance in the game's racial politics, she writes, also ignores "the idea that racism in its most insidious form is less about villainy and more about institutionalized, systemic, and normalized violence. Paying attention to how games interpellate players and direct player experience through game elements like choice and decision making can yield rich readings inaccessible through purely literary or cinematic criticism."

Deb Streusand's "Alice or Wonderland: How Visual Representations of a Story Change Over Time." I'll freely admit, Deb's post on Alice cover arts has all the ingredients for catching my attention: children's literature, a current exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, and a lovely analyis of how cover art reflects the changing values of parents and publishers.

My favorite post to write this year is a tie. I had a great time writing my "Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts" which explores the dialogue over guilt and sweets. It isn't particularly insightful, but I loved thinking about the seven deadly sins almsot as much as I enjoyed committing all of the food sins on that list. And, as I mentioned above, I'm a sucker for analyses that use the Harry Ransom Center and children's culture, so my other favorite is my very first post for viz., "The Serpent Was a Creeper: Religious Representations of Animals and Humanity in Children's Literature." Any chance I get to expound upon religious adaptation, children's books, or creepy illustrations!

That's all, folks. Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for the next set of viz. posts in the fall!

Tags:

nostalgia

Visual Rhetoric

appreciation

video games

adaptations

Wrapping Up the Year

Deb Streusand — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:41:20 +0000

It’s almost the end of the year for viz.! Over the next few days, we’ll be wrapping up with each writer getting a chance to list and discuss their top five favorite posts from the past year. Here are mine.

Scott Garbacz on Guardians of the Galaxy: Scott’s analysis of images from the film gets at sci-fi’s ability to convey not merely excitement and adventure, but the beauty that can be found in the unfamiliar. He shows how the film creates a rhetoric of compassion in the midst of entertainment.

Aubri Plourde on childhood sexualization: our resident expert on childhood takes down the idea that sexualizing a young person like Miley Cyrus is anything new. Analyzing images of toddlers pictured as adults and the adult Madonna pictured as a child, she demonstrates that the phenomenon is both widespread and time-honored.

Emily Lederman on the Chipotle “Scarecrow” ad: Emily examines the holes in the messaging of Chipotle’s much-watched ad. She asks incisive questions about how friendly to the environment and to animals Chipotle’s food sourcing really is.

My post on a new cover for the Jungle Book: I like it when I get to get a little political on viz. In this case, I enjoyed getting to the root of the problems with the visual message conveyed by this children’s book cover.

My favorite post to work on this year was on the visual rhetoric of girly drinks and its relationship to heteronormativity. I examined the implications of calling particular types of drinks “girly” and what that convention says about conceptions of gender in modern American culture.

That’s it! Thank you for your readership this year and for exploring visual rhetoric with us.

Tags:

Visual Rhetoric

nostalgia

appreciation

New Girl's New Man

Aubri Plourde — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 02:15:46 +0000

Fox’s New Girl could never have avoided the question of gender. The very title isolates gender issues by framing protagonist Jessica Day within the male-dominated apartment she joins. The sexual politics of New Girl are mostly wrapped up in Zooey Deschanel’s character. My friend Mike, for example, has written about Jess as a postfeminist figure here, and the show creator herself has more than once addressed the gender politics of the Nick-and-Jess coupledom. I’d like to acknowledge that the “adorkable” appeal of Deschanel’s character positions her strangely between feminist and postfeminist positions, but, for the purpose of considering the visual appeal of the show, I’m more drawn to the way the show represents the masculinity of lovable douchebag, Schmit.

Most of Schmidt’s best and worst qualities are verbal, not visual. For example, entire reels of one-liners, like this one and this one show off the snappy writing of New Girl’s staff. Still, the character’s arch depends heavily on the transition between the days when he was obese and the fit version we see weekly.

Schmidt's story begins like this:

Image Credit: E!online

So, Schmidt’s role becomes something of a dramatized before-and-after shot. Most of these flashbacks are meant to assure us that while Nick and Schmidt’s friendship was founded during this time period, Schmidt himself was desperately unhappy. His smiles are generally self-deprecating, or at the very least unaware that others are mocking him.

After having lost a whole bunch of weight, Schmidt looks more like the fit and handsome Max Greenfield:

Image Credit: Us Weekly

On the show, though, Schmidt’s body is still the site of spectacle. He’s the character we’re most likely to see in a costume, and his body has started to function like a paper doll for the writers’ various getups:

Image Credit: UnderScoopFire

Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly

Image Credit: Hollywood.com

What strikes me is that this outlandish behavior is so often associated with Schmidt’s trying-too-hard enthusiasm for his new body. In other words, thinness has corrupted him into the cartoon we (I, at least) love to laugh at. So, this brings up interesting questions for masculinity. Are we viewers in for a more nuanced and sensitive treatment of male body image issues? Also, how does “metrosexuality” get figured in visual terms?

I’m interested in the way the show positions Schmidt’s morality. Nick describes him as a sweet boy in college, yelling, “What happened to you?…You didn’t used to be like this, Schmidt!” when Schmidt insists on wearing this kimono:

Image Credit: Lifehack

The costume, then, dramatizes Schmidt’s deteriorated morality and his self-image. Similarly, the Douchebag Jar hints that Schmidt lost weight and sensitivity at the same time. This, too, is a sort of strange system of morality. Does the Douchebag jar make us think that his casually racist-misogynist-classist behavior is acceptable, because he can afford the “toll”? Or is this behavior excused by the show (and by Jess, the show’s moral compass) because of his previously-fat past? In a cultural backdrop all too aware of fat shaming, body image issues, and materialism, how are we meant to deal with Schmidt’s transition? We don’t quite love to hate him, since most fans find him endearing. Still, we can’t deny that the lines he spouts to earn himself more Douchebag Jar deposits have more than earned some censure. "I just found a Groupon for hypnosis lessons!” he says to Jess. "Think about what you could do with that...sex stuff!” (s01e10). Or, upon Winston’s failure at a trivia night: "Don't worry about it, man, it's your public school education - you'll catch up!” (s01e17). The show suggests that a fat Schmidt would never say such terrible things. What is it about thinness that has corrupted him? How are we meant to view Schmidt’s excessive performance of masculinity?

I have no answer to this kind of question, so I’ll just leave this here:

Image Credit: Walk in Beauty

"Your caveman ideas about manhood are so over. Manhood today is about exfoliation, cheese courses, emotional honesty, and Paxil. And yes, cutting peppers in teh classic style de Julienne. You may have bested me in a competition of pre-Clinton manhood, but I am Schmidt, a refined and enlightened pescatarian, 90% of the time." (s02e08).

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