Expository Writing Essay Example For Students

Expository Writing Essay The relationship between language and image provides us with the means to seek the roots of our own ideas. In the essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, written by Adrienne Rich, she uses varying images in her poetry to describe women and the voice open the window into her self-perception and how cultural ideologies change. John Berger writes in, Ways of Seeing that the relationship between the image and the person is an individual interpretation. Hunger as Ideology, by Susan Bordo, tells how the image is used to show cultural ideologies, especially for women. In art, literature, and in the media, images that are perceived visually or through the images produced by language are used as a form of expression that quite unavoidably reflect cultural ideologies that impact us in intentionally strong and deliberate ways. Cultural ideology affects how we perceive images; both visual and those produced by language. These images impact our perception of reality. The images that inf iltrate our lives appear to focus on maintaining the status quo or the norms of society. They are designed to show what is expected in life. Berger states, Images were made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent(107). Berger argues images are conjured up or imagined to represent what is absent or what the individual wants to see as reality. There used to be a tendency to over exemplify the way in which women were thought to be, but today, that opposition no longer seems to hold quite as rigidly as it once did (women are indeed objectified more than ever, but, in this image-dominated culture, men increasingly are too) (156). Regardless of societys attempt to be politically correct, and despite the changes that have occurred in rigid gender identity, our society still maintains many of the old stereotypes that have always been a part of established culture. In order to assist in the destabilizing of images Rich states, A change in the concept of sexual identity is e ssential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution (605). Rich believes a change in the concept or the way people are viewed is essential if the past is not going to reassert itself in the future. The images imagined is the change needed to be taken in the future. However, the images that surround us seem to do nothing more than maintain and sustain the traditional gender ideology. Although Rich tried to have Aunt Jennifer in Aunt Jennifers Tiger, be a person as distinct from herself as possible, she portrays Aunt Jennifer as being oppressed by her marriage. Rich reflects the same oppression through the use of images such as, The massive weight of the Uncles wedding band (608). The massive or extreme burden caused by the wedding band or the marriage to suppresser. She is being oppressed by her husband. The image of Aunt Jennifer portrays the traditional ideology of the women under the control of a man. Bordo discusses the ideological construction of service as a womans natural role, states, It is this construction that it reinforces in the representations I have been examining, through their failure to depict males as naturally fulfilling that role, and more perniciously through their failure to depict females as appropriate recipients of such care (161). Women have an ideal role of subordination to men, and men have the oppressive role to be in charge and to provide for the female, though how ideal that role may be is questionable. Bordo means Richs poetry depicts the current role of women in society and strives to express the need to fight the oppression and victimization of women. Her poetry creates a strong image of the position of women in society. Berger claims that, Every image embodies a way of seeing (107). Because of our own personal history, we may or may not recognize the image of Jennifer as negative. It is possible to look at Jennifer as living in a way that is the accepted function in our culture. This is an image, however negative that it may be, that is culturally accepted as how gender roles should be and therefore reinforces its stabilization. Effects of Population Growth in the Philippines EssaySocial Issues