Fetishism

The genre of portraiture has a rich history revolving around the empowerment of the white body, while simultaneously disenfranchising the black body. The artistic canon has set a precedent that favours Masterpieces with European tendencies and aspects. Kehinde Wiley, an African-American artist, employs the apt use of the appropriation of historical pieces to challenge the traditional art historical canon that defines masterpieces. When replacing the usual white male subjects who appear in…

Studying the complex nature of globalisation through the lens of paradigms may, to some, seem outdated. However, but by analysing globalisation this way, we see underlying structures that link seemingly unrelated aspects, thus allowing for a more robust understanding of the wider globalisation phenomena. The nature of these underlying structures is a point of ongoing contention for sociologists. Functionalists argue that although society is made up of individual actors making decisions for…

Introduction The term “utopia” is a Greek neologism coined by Thomas More in 1516 for his book Utopia that describes a fictional ideal society, which consequently is referring to the ideal community that possesses perfect qualities and egalitarian principles for citizens. The desire of pursuing such ideal realms has diversely manifested in the history of architectural development while entering the twentieth century when the modern movement has peaked, the popularity of utopian…

Born out of a reaction to challenge the mainstream, youth subcultures are an ever-evolving and important part of society. Along with music, dress is a vital tool in the subcultural meaning system, used to express and convey the views of its participants. In this essay, I will be examining the meanings conveyed through the dress of punks in England in the late 1970s. subculture specifically what? Ideals / fetishistic “Youth subcultures can be defined as meaning systems, modes of expression or…

Discussing time travelling sci-fi movies as provoking a longing and sense of mystery amongst the audience. The author also describes the ‘retro-fetishism’ associated with the directors of these types of films in creating a familiar world for which the audience can travel to and how these worlds ‘reassures its audience that the pleasures of retromania are here to stay’ (ibid p.49). The author also…

We may quit taking into account weapon fetishism. We may expand the quantity of secondary school rifle groups, the diminishing of which, following calls for bans beginning in the 1960s, has helped leave weapon preparing to films and computer…

Couples would stay together for the sake of convenience. Economic turmoil was held above all in marriages so no one really knew what a real relationship was like. This psychological tendency is something he called ‘commodity fetishism’ because it makes us value things with no object value. The worst thing about capitalism, according to Marx, is that it gives us the ideas and teaches us to be antsy, zealousness, traditionalist, and politically self-satisfied. Max Weber, separately…

The article, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre & Excess’1 by Linda Williams explores whether the forms of sex, violence and emotion found in the genres of pornography, horror, and melodrama (specifically the woman’s weepie) respectively, are as gratuitous as my film scholars and critics believe them to be. Setting out to disprove this idea, Williams’ investigates and compares the form, function, and system of the three genres. Ultimately, William’s central claims reveal the value in the supposed…

In Media 568, the specific case study of a global corporation, as Coca Cola Co., guided the intellectual exploration of the foundations of the field and its main concepts, as commodification, fetishism, coding and decoding, mass production, cultural industries, structuration and marketing, and distinction, among others. The book of Vincent Mosco on the Political Economy of Communication was the trunk from which we entangled basic readings on, for…

that the sharing economy makes the social aspect of production highly apparent as members of the proletariat are exchanging their labor directly with one another rather than value being “stored up” in commodities and therefore obscured by commodity fetishism. When laborers exchange their labor directly with one another, even as surplus value is being extracted from them, they are more likely to recognize that they are mutually subordinated by the bourgeoisie and class consciousness resultingly…