Length: 450-500 Words, double-spaced.
[Please respond to all 3 prompts.]
1. Referring to the following pages in Baudrillard’s “Mass Media Culture,” please discuss what “cool” might mean in relation to his ideas about “cultural recycling”(p. 100-102), and consumption as responding to a quiz question (p. 105). (100 words)
2. Choose ONE of the characters from the film, I’m a Cyborg but That’s Okay, and discuss and analyze him or her in relation to Harraway’s notion of “posthumanism” in her article, i.e., the continuum between the human and the machine and between the human and the animal. (e.g., Young-Goon, Il-soon, Young-Goon’s grandmother, or any of the other characters in the psychiatric hospital.) Put another way, how would you imagine the notion of posthumanism help the character you’ve chosen to analyze to feel that he or she is okay, though he or she is a machine or an animal? (150-200 words)
3. Please discuss A and B separately. You don’t need to connect them in your response.
A) Using Richard Dyer’s notion of “stereotyping through iconography,” discuss, in the documentary, Koryo Saram: the Unreliable People, how the mainstream Soviet propaganda films used iconographic images of hardworking Koreans and produce a “positive” stereotype of an ethnic minority group. How do the characters and their memories of the community’s history in the documentary counter or contradict these images? (100 words)
B) Using the distinction Dyer makes between stereotype and member-type, discuss how the film, The Tuman River, represents both the Korean Chinese community’s stereotyping of North Koreans—or (intra-ethnic) “racism” against North Korean defectors—and North Korean defectors as “member-types.” (100 words)