Fetishism

In today’s western capitalist societies individuals are consciously and subconsciously immersed into the constantly growing world of technology, with the internet, social media and global connectivity. This emergence of new media and technology has profound effects on society and individuals. Thus, bringing forth the theory of ‘the Culture Industry’ and its relevance today. The culture industry argument was developed by Adorno and Horkheimer and focuses on the effects of capitalist mass media…

Introduction: Thesis statement: The Media’s portrayal of African American’s is racially biased, reinforcing the misconception that people of colour in the United States are inferior to those of other ethnicities and perpetuating self-hate within the African American community. Divided Topic: African Americans are criminals. They are the most dangerous race in all of the United States. African Americans are unintelligent in comparison to White Americans. African Americans are unattractive…

Popular culture is an ambiguous and fluid concept with no absolute definition, so far. Many theorists have studied popular culture and have come to different conclusions, by critically analysing The Frankfurt school of thought alongside the Culturalist school of thought an argument will be made towards which is more useful to the study of popular culture. Using relevant case studies to aid in the argument. The Frankfurt School (1923) stemmed from classical Marxist ideology. This group of…

people having poor interpersonal skills. Some people may have learned their paraphilia from classical or operant conditioning. It is also more common in men than it is in women. We will discuss eight different types of paraphilia. The first one is Fetishism. This is an arousal to a nonhuman object, non-genital body part, or a bodily secretion. The…

Sarah Lucas, born in 1962, is an English artist who is known for her works that include visual puns and bawdy humour. In 2000, one of her works was installed and presented at the Freud Museum in London. This installation came to known as "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". The installation was quite a contradiction to the interior environment of the museum itself. Yet, the significance of the location is not lost upon the audience once they disintegrate the different layers of meaning that comes…

We live in a time where significant change has been made through the use of technology. No area of life has been unaffected, pregnancy included. Ever since Ian Donald used sonar to see a fetus inside of the womb in the 1950s, ultrasound technology has been utilized to examine the development of fetuses (Tropp 2013, 19). When it became apparent that there was a high demand for visual imaging technologies in pregnancy the ultrasound began to emerge as a routine practice to monitor pregnancy. With…

In the article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey details her beliefs that traditional Hollywood films are a representation of societies patriarchal ideals. She states that as “men dictate the rules,” they ultimately formulate the “ideal visions, roles and dominance over women” (843). She expresses that a “male gaze,” in which the audience views a world dictated by heterosexual males, has largely been accepted by the media. Although Mulvey states that the representation of…

Naomi Klein states that in modern socioeconomic structures, consumers and workers are beginning to have “no space,” “no choice,” and, “no jobs.” Expounding upon this, she says that the goal of corporations is to make the entire public sphere a place to market their products. Then, Klein describes how modern society is not natural, but rather heavily regulated by corporations. Finally, corporations are explained as controllers of the global workforce, in essence turning workers into a means of…

Also, with the use of celebrity’s it has made their brand more valuable and desirable with the celebrity image emending into the consumers minds which results to the consumer associating the endorser with Nike’s products. Furthermore, commodity fetishism describes that the value of a certain object does not necessarily come from the labour that created the object or how the object is used but from the feeling that the object grants you, in other words the identity. Nike is a company that has…

People associated their own meaning to a product (243). This is known as fetishism of a commodity. “Requiem for the American Dream” illustrates this through the advertising industry. Chomsky states that ads are a way to create consumers and tries to control people (Hutchison & Nyks, 2015). The advertising industry tries to sell…