McTucky Fried High: Cartoons Create Unique Opportunities to Discuss LBGTQ Issues in MLE

Much like puppets, cartoons can offer opportunities to examine complicated and controversial issues through comedy and allegory that offer critical distance from the embodied engagement with human actors in video. McTucky Fried High is a compelling, often funny, new animated web series that uses fast food characters to portray LBGTQ issues among teens at school. Viewing this series may not fly in socially conservative educational communities, but in moderate or progressive communities, the series offers media literacy educators of teens and young adults an opportunity to laugh about and discuss the trials and tribulations around sexual identity in high school. The following Vialogue post invites discussion while modeling prompts for media literacy inquiry useful for exploring gay identity representation and for discussing how the McTucky Fried High culture relates to your learners' reality, with the following key questions:

• How do students assume gay people are oppressed at McTucky High? How are they actually oppressed? 
• How does it seem they are supported? 
• How is gay identity exploited by students? 
• How do these representations of oppression, support and exploitation compare to the reality at your school?

I was especially excited to see these cartoons after reading parts of Lauren Berliner's dissertation, Making It Better: LGBT Youth and New Pedagogies of Media Production (2013), where she critiques identity-based youth media production projects like the It Gets Better Campaign for "interpellating queer youth into fixed, homogenous, subject positions" and "conflating video visibility with action, expression, and power" (p. 230). Part of her critique called my attention to the power of remaining unseen or unnamed (as gay, or what have you), which well-meaning youth media production activities may disrupt by making learners perform or embody their beliefs on video. The McTucky Fried High web series offers not only a rich media text for analysis of LGBTQ issues from a variety of points of view, which students may or may not take up at their own discretion, but it also suggests animation as a medium for youth production activities addressing identity issues.

[More after the jump on how cartoons allow learners to confront identity issues with distance from embodiment in media literacy analysis and production; and a bit on the tension in MLE around educators taking up particular political positions]

Artwork Comments on the Meat Market that is the Tinder App: A Visual Pun to Inspire Your Own Humorous Art

This short video below of an art installation is hilarious if you know what the Tinder App is, and most young folks (say, ages 10-30) that use mobile media do know about it. For those familiar with Tinder, the message about the app is pretty clear, and for media literacy educators it offers an opportunity beyond discussing dating apps to challenge and inspire learners to create their own artwork that expresses their feelings or views on a particular type of media device, app, or use.

If you don't know what Tinder is, the tweens, adolescents, young adults and skeevy over 35's in your life can tell you--though I wouldn't recommend introducing the topic with kids under high school age unless it's already a thing with them. It's a dating app for touch screen mobile phones where you swipe right if you approve of the photo and short bio of the person who appears, or left to see the next person. You may then choose to contact those you swipe right to meet in person or to chat by text or by phone.

I suppose analyzing the metaphor is the right way to start; however, remind learners that you're not doing it to kill the humor, but so that they might be inspired to create their own visual metaphors for some media use that they feel strongly about that we may use uncritically or take for granted. So, um... it's a piece of raw meat repeatedly swiping right on a touch screen phone loaded with the Tinder app--what could it possibly mean?!? You could let that discussion drift into safety and ethical questions around dating apps like Tinder (if you swipe right for that sort of thing), or you could focus on creating visual metaphors for other media uses by breaking learners into creative teams to: 1) choose an app, game, media use, or some such media related behavior they feel strongly about; 2) describe the media app/use/behavior and express their feelings in a sentence or two; 3) develop a visual metaphor to communicate their view of the media app/use/behavior; 4) realize the visual metaphor in their own artwork; 5) if everyone is into it, have a small show of your work for your greater learning community, or post to someplace online (and send us a link!).

The installation above was a video project created in the Netherlends by video game design student Marcello Gomez Maureira. Thanks to boingboing for sharing!

For more on Tinder try this or this... and lots more out there, too.

"Strong Female Protagonist" Web Comic Features Strong Female Protagonist

I once heard someone say they were paraphrasing Mark Twain as saying, "The sign of a gifted intelligence is the ability to be ironic and sincere at the same time." By that standard, Strong Female Protagonist is a seriously smart comic--and funny, too.

Writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag spoof on the superhero genre while exploring the everyday struggles of female adolescence, as protagonist Alison Green, a.k.a. Mega-Girl, struggles to make a difference in the world beyond fighting and violence while negotiating celebrity culture.

Looking at what makes Alison/Mega-Girl different from most comic book heroes presents an opportunity to learn about the limitations of typical superhero comics. For a quick introduction, there's a great overview of the plot, characters and style of the comic by Mey in her "Drawn to Comics" column over at the Autostraddle blog ("News, entertainment...and Girl-On-Girl Culture"). I think this comic would make a great addition to any study of media constructions of heroism in high school or college English/Film/Media classes, particularly in relation to superheroes in comics or film genres where relatable "Strong Female Protagonists" are few and far between and questionable to downright sexist portrayals of women characters masquerading as good role models are the norm. More images and ideas after the jump.
[The comic includes some profanity and sexual situations, including same sex and transgender themes; as always, preview the content for your learning community to assess appropriateness].

Barbie Dolls Up Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover in Time for Women's History Month

When I saw the news that Barbie would be on this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit magazine cover, and that it wasn't a joke, my brain short circuited with the absurdity of it, to the point where I could barely put words to my feelings. Thankfully, Stephen Colbert's comedy articulates the many, many things that are wrong with having a children's toy (marketed to girls) on the cover of a mainstream sports magazine's annual portfolio of barely clothed women models in seductive poses (marketed to men and boys).

"The swimsuit issue has always been a bastion of Civil Rights, from the occasional Black model to that one girl who was under 5'10""

Of course, he does it by satirically praising the move from a sexist, hetero-normative point a view that sharpens the clarity on how harmful and insidious this use of Barbie may be (as well as the worldview that justifies and condones it). I like the idea of using this humorous introduction to the issue with high school or college media studies students because it predicts and disarms many of the sexist rationales for justifying Barbie's appearance on the SI swimsuit issue cover.

"Empowerment. Because there's nothing more empowering to a model than being replaced by a piece of plastic... In some ways she's the perfect model...She doesn't blink. She doesn't move. She's too busy being empowered to talk."

I think it's especially challenging to get people to share and develop their opinions in dialogue across genders, sexualities, and interest groups with issues like this. But making your learning space safe for debate and growth is well worth the risks, trials and errors. Maybe a satirical frame can help. Some ideas for using this clip after the jump.