Stereotypes

Stereotypes have always interested me. I just don't understand what people come up with for their images. And the lack of observation is why. Or for the ones that do use observation, they can still choose to depict them in unnatural ways. It's engrossing to see the work that people can come up with depicting stereotypes or working with them in a number of ways. People can just not think about what their doing and just follow the stereotypes that were handed down to them, or they can use it for a number of other reasons. They could follow the stereotypes to make a point. To make a social commentary. Stereotypes are used so commonly for social commentary. For myself, for my illustration media class, we have to find a black and white image of a face and we can add a caricature to it. I found an image of Michael Jackson when he was in the Jackson 5. I sat down with my sketchbook and started to figure out how to make it over exaggerated for a caricature. I chose to make his afro incredibly large. And as to be expected, I exaggerated his nose as well. (Since he had one back then). Part of me, while I was drawing this, was wondering if I was doing something that was too stereotypical. People tend to overexaggerate hair and nose for African Americans. Their teeth as well. Take Fat Albert for an example. We watched it today in class. A lot of them had afros. Pretty much all of them had huge teeth. It just fits the stereotype for African Americans.

Women and men are stereotyped all the time. And it's pretty much always the men that do it. Their depictions of women will have large chests, thin waist, wide hips and skinny legs. They basically always have long hair, large lips and the women are always looking as sexual as possible. Take the Bond movies for example. Has there ever been a voluptuous woman as his leading lady? How about men. Has there ever been an average looking James Bond? Men can be just as stereotyped as women. Although I do think that the women stereotypes happen more often. It's all thanks to the standards of beauty.

A reference that I just found the other day was on the website called Dump.com. One of the images has cartoon character versions of popular websites. It includes facebook, myspace, twitter, wikipedia, deviantart, youtube and google. Here is the link for the image. It's not only people that can be represented in stereotypes. Even websites can be represented in such a way. And it works. You can see by looking at that image that it's stereotyping the connotations and feel of the websites.

Over the weekend, I read "The Golem's Mighty Swing" by James Sturm. I actually quite enjoyed the comic. I've always found antisemitism to be a topic that I want to know about. The comic focused a lot on that. The part that stood out the most to me was during their games later, when they have Hershl as the Golem. The Golem is used to get more people showing up to their games. But people aren't coming to watch the game. They're coming to see the Jews. For example, the crowd throws rocks at the manager's younger brother, Mo. They're trying to knock his hat off so they can see his horns. The whole 'Jews have horns' idea is just funny to me. We talked about it in a past English class in high school when we were reading Dante's "Inferno". My teacher told us about how there was a mis-translation in the past where Moses had horns when the translation was really supposed to be translated into "a ray of light". So I find it funny when people think that Jews have horns because of it.

Stereotypes will never go away. They've been around forever and I don't believe that they will ever dissipate.