 This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
When media representations are analyzed, the discussion often focuses on identity categories: gender, race, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, disability, and so on. Those analyses matter. But there are other parameters of representations that deserve our attention. Stories also reproduce deeper narrative assumptions about how social life works. These can be assumptions of how the world is divided into villains and heroes/victims, into "bad guys" and "good guys." Or these can be assumptions about why social problems exist and what social change is supposed to look like. Media texts created for children are a particularly useful place to notice these assumptions, not because authors are secretly trying to persuade children into a political worldview, but because these texts often translate adult common sense into simple, memorable narrative forms. The result is that media texts created for children can reproduce ways of seeing that feel natural precisely because they are presented as funny and obvious. Mo Willems’s 2009 book Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed is a useful case study. It is a story about a cultural pattern and an attempt to break it. The book is playful, and the stakes are deliberately low. But that is exactly what makes it revealing: it turns a question about social change into a clean, comic sequence where meanings flip quickly and everything resolves. You can continue reading here. [This essay will be included in Newsletter #23]
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