Introduction:

For years I had heard about how American beauty standards represented and propelled in the media are unrealistic, detrimental and impressionable for women in society. This got Georgie and I thinking further, into if these same ideas are present in other cultures and if so how impressionable they are. Having heard about the Korean skincare phenomenon, we decided to further investigate the beauty standards within Korean culture, to find there was an abundance of information to be unpacked. We decided to take the angle from three common categories that popped up throughout our beginning research; skin lightening, cosmetic surgery and the use of makeup and skincare. An auto-ethnographic approach to this topic was beneficial to allow us to compare our experience with westernised beauty standards as young woman with Korean ideals of beauty.

Research & Methodology:

As I had made several attempts at an auto-ethnographical approach to research and…

Starting off BCM320’s semester with the film, ‘Love For Sale’ (2018), directed by Andibachtiar Yusuf. The Indonesian film explores the challenges and social pressure felt by a man who is challenged to bring a date to their wedding, therefore leading Richard to download a dating app. Through this he meets Arini and we see their story unfold (IMDB, 2018). Exploring modern day struggles with money, work and love. Through this series of blog posts after indulging in several films from various cultures, I will analyse the various cultural differences through auto-enthnography. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) defined auto-ethnography as an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. Through application of this I will attempt to understand Asian culture more in depth.

Although, in Western culture the plot for Love For Sale by know means is…

This week I indulged in the first four episodes of the 2018 anime, ‘Hi-Score Girl’. The series explores several adventures undertaken by a young girl and boy who build a relationship through their love for arcade/video games in Japan in 1991. Though this was my first time delving into the genre, I surprisingly enjoyed anime more than I originally anticipated (maybe I judged to early, because this was within the first episodes opening credits).

Within the first scenes of the first episode, the issue of gender stereotyping caught my attention. Haruo assumes that because Akira is a female and also comes for a wealthy background she shouldn’t be nearly as good at video games as she is.

“She’s not the kind of girl that comes here”, a quote from Haruo further portrays the idea, that because Akira comes from a more upper class background with very good grades she doesn’t…

This weeks seminar involved the watching and live tweeting of a Pakistani film called, ‘Cake’ (2018) directed by Asim Abbasi. To summarise this weeks film, Cake is about three separated siblings within a family coming back together due to their fathers deteriorating health. Within the film, we are taken on a journey of carefully explore the relationships between sisters, between parents and children, between friends and lovers. Through events such as the past catching up to them, a death and individual struggles of siblings being intertwined with the family.

At first, I compared the film to last weeks screening ‘Furie’ and found it quite slower, however around halfway through i was enwrapped in the storyline and emotionally invested with the plot and characters. So much so that I felt myself get a little bit teary eyed throughout the sad scenes within the film.

Cake is very much another film with…

Auto-ethnography, as described by Ellis (2001) is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.” Today, I had my first auto-ethnographical experience with Japanese media through the film, ‘Furie’ 2019.

Through a different, some may even say ‘uncultured’ upbringing, ‘Furie’ happened to my first interaction with a film with this dramatically different cinematography style. Enforcing the idea that my understanding of Asian cultures could be considered somewhat limited in various aspects. For example, this was my first experience watching a foreign film in a different language. In saying this another observation I have after watching the film in entirety, is that towards the second half of ‘Furie’, even though it wasn’t in English, I found myself relying less on the subtitles. As I began to pick up and understand what was going on through the dramatization, body…