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Before and After

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Before and After
Mr. Chris Bender College Writing 1 07/10/2012 Final Draft In her essay “Before and After: Class and Body Transformations,” Julia Serano indicates how TV shows affect some peoples decisions. She takes on TV shows and documentaries and she marks down how they display shows of people crossing the normal social boundary and how these TV shows are degrading those people crossing. People all around the world of different cultures are all affected by the vast rapidly spreading media. Most people watch TV regularly, and they watch TV shows about body transformation and plastic surgeries that amazes them. At first they were not planning to watch it but after seeing the before and after photos of the person being transformed with either plastic surgery or sex reassignment, people would be magnetized to these shows and would want to watch it every time. By doing that more and more people would start watching the show which in effect would change their own way of thinking about other people and about themselves. I want to argue that media nowadays are trying to make people believe that these transformations are normal, which would change the typical mentally of the person watching that TV show or listening to the media.
Firstly, in my own point of view I think that the media creates these image that what they are trying to do is to our own benefit. Serano argues that she knows “that many in the Trans community believe that these TV shows and documentaries following transsexuals through the transition process serve a purpose, offering us a bit of visibility and the rare chance to be depicted on TV as something other than a joke. But in actuality, they accomplish little more than reducing us to our physical transitions and our atomically ‘altered’ bodies. In other words, these programs objectify us” (Serano 397). What Serano is saying is that TV shows make it seem that they are just showing us these types of



Cited: Page 1) Julia Serano. “Before and After: Class and Body Transformations.” Emerging. Barclay Barrios. New York: Breford/ST. Martins, 2010. Pages 394, 397 2) “Folkways.” Dictionary.com. 2011. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/folkways

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