Teagen Fedro-Soehngen's Language and Power Blog

(Photo Credit: pexels.com) This week’s topic, global English, focused on how the English language has become a standard for many countries around the world. The films also touched on how this phenomenon causes some cultural dilemmas for countries where English is a second language. English in China The first film focused on how English has become the primary language for many urban Chinese, especially in business. In almost a single generation, English went from outlawed too essential. Children born in the 1970’s began their life speaking only Chinese, but by the 1990’s these young adults were quickly finding a need to learn English to stay competitive in the workplace. Today, speaking English has become so vital that almost all Eastern Chinese cities not only have workshops where English is taught, but have primary level schools teaching English to young children. The main interviewee, Bob Shi, spoke, in English, at length about how his experience of growing up with Chinese being

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(Photo Credit: pexels.com) This week’s film was the documentary T he Social Dilemma . A film that spoke with several developers who started some of social media platforms that just about everyone uses today. The focus of the film was about how social media algorithms are designed to keep you on the app for as long as possible. They are constantly feeding things the user posts that will keep the person’s attention to push more advertisement so the company can make more money. The developers from platforms like Twitter and Facebook spoke about their worry and insight from their insider knowledge. My Personal Story Being from an older generation, who grew up with what is being called an “Analog Childhood”, I saw the invention of social media. I remember having MySpace but because I was not a popular kid at school my friends list was always small, and I quickly grew bored of it. I did not even bother with Facebook until I was leaving to go across the country to college and I wanted t

This week’s film, Disclosure , centered on the history and hardships that transgender persons have had in the United States. The film highlighted how media portrayals of the transgender community have changed since the 1920’s and the struggles that still remain to this day. (Photo Credit: pexels.com) Since the start of filmmaking, transgender people have been highlighted on the screen but sadly as the butt of the joke. Used as jesters and deviants, comic relief, or as people who did not quite fit in, the transgender community was sidelined and in most of the United States, criminalized. As the film described, transgender people in the media were often portrayed as villains or victims. Alfred Hitchcock often had the murderer in his story as a cross dressing person. Films like Silence of the Lambs , The Crying Game , and Dressed to Kill all have cross dressing characters who are the villains. The film brings to the forefront that because over 80% of Americans do not know a transgend

Photo Credit: pexels.com The Codes of Gender is a film on the sociologist Erving Goffman’s view of advertising and how cultural norms for gender are amplified in the realm of advertising. The film’s goal is explaining how gender is a cultural construct and that advertising is the most concentrated versions of what a male or female should be. This film is narrated by Sut Jhally, who is a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Jhally proclaims that “…my focus is advertising and consumer culture, I am broadly concerned with ideology, consciousness, and politics” (University of Massachusetts Amherst). The film follows these ideals by asking the audience to realize how advertisement is the biggest purveyor of what we consider masculine or feminine. Femininity Photo Credit: pexels.com The film goes into detail about how women are shown as soft and vulnerable. The model’s body is shown in poses that are not normal for the human body to be in. The

(Source: Second Hen'd) My name is Teagen Fedro-Soehngen, and I am a senior at Webster University. I am majoring in Legal Studies, and I have worked as a paralegal or legal assistant at various firms for ten years. I grew up just outside of Chicago and have lived in St.  Louis since 2006. My hobbies are gardening and caring for my flock of chickens. I also volunteer for an organization called Second Hen'd that finds loving homes for ex-commercial laying hens. The photo is of one of the girl's transformation from caged conditions to beloved pet.   (Source: pexels.com) For myself, language and power come into play since my job is in the legal field. One of the fields mentioned in our reading as holding its "...dominance with the complicity of the general public..." (Ng, 2017). This allows attorneys to hold power over the general population. The use of Latin and other terms, such as administratrix or executrix, referred to as legalese, are often archaic and confuse th