Sut Jhally
2021He is best known as the producer and director of a number of films and videos (including Dreamworlds: Desire/Sex/Power in Music Video; Tough Guise: Media, Violence and the Crisis of Masculinity; and Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire) that deal with issues ranging from gender, sexuality and race to commercialism, violence and politics. Born in Kenya, raised in England, and educated in graduate studies in Canada, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Stuart Hall: Race, The Floating Signifier
Sut Jhally
Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall offers an accessible and clarifying analysis of the social construction of race and racial difference. He explores how variations in people's appearances come to be mistaken for essential differences. He traces how these misinterpretations function both to express and to reproduce dominant power relations. And he argues for more rigorous engagements with identity, representation, and contingency capable of acknowledging and respecting difference without essentializing it. An ideal introduction to how cultural studies intervenes in debates about race, representation, identity, and power.
Stuart Hall: Race, The Floating Signifier
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
Sut Jhally
This video shows how the foreign policy interests of American political elites-working in combination with Israeli public relations stratgies-influence US news reporting about the Middle East conflict. Combining American and British TV news clips with observations of analysts, journalists and political activists, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a brief historical overview, a striking media comparison, and an examination of factors that have distorted U.S. media coverage and, in turn, American public opinion.
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image Of Women
Sut Jhally
Jean Kilbourne
The documentary focuses on images of women in advertising, in particular on gender stereotypes, the effects of advertising on women's self-image and the objectification of women's bodies.
Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image Of Women
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
Sut Jhally, Jeremy Earp
This documentary places the Bush Administration's original justifications for war in Iraq within the larger context of a two-decade struggle by neo-conservatives to dramatically increase military spending while projecting American power and influence globally by means of force.
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women
Sut Jhally
Jean Kilbourne
Jean Kilbourne's pioneering work helped develop and popularize the study of gender representation in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films have influenced millions of college and high school students across two generations and on an international scale. In this important new film, Kilbourne reviews if and how the image of women in advertising has changed over the last 20 years. With wit and warmth, Kilbourne uses over 160 ads and TV commercials to critique advertising's image of women. By fostering creative and productive dialogue, she invites viewers to look at familiar images in a new way, that moves and empowers them to take action.
Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women
Capitalism Hits the Fan
Sut Jhally
Richard Wolff
With breathtaking clarity, renowned University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government "bailouts," stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes.
Capitalism Hits the Fan
Advertising and the End of the World
Sut Jhally
Focusing directly on the world of commercial images, Sut Jhally asks some basic questions about the cultural messages emanating from this market-based view of the world: Do our present arrangements deliver what they claim -- happiness and satisfaction? Can we think about our collective as well as our private interests? And, can we think long-term as well as short-term?
Advertising and the End of the World
Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People
Sut Jhally, Jeremy Earp
Jack Shaheen
This documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run virtually unchallenged form the earliest days of silent film to today's biggest Hollywood blockbusters. The film explores a long line of degrading images of Arabs--from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding "terrorists"--along the way offering devastating insights into the origin of these stereotypic images, their development at key points in US history, and why they matter so much today.
Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People
Stuart Hall: Representation & the Media
Sut Jhally
Stuart Hall, Sut Jhally
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall offers an extended meditation on representation. Moving beyond the accuracy or inaccuracy of specific representations, Hall argues that the process of representation itself constitutes the very world it aims to represent, and explores how the shared language of a culture, its signs and images, provides a conceptual roadmap that gives meaning to the world rather than simply reflecting it. Hall's concern throughout is the centrality of culture to the shaping of our collective perceptions, and how the dynamics of media representation reproduce forms of symbolic power.
Stuart Hall: Representation & the Media
Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity
Sut Jhally
Tough Guise systematically examines the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century.
Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity
The Codes of Gender
Sut Jhally
Sut Jhally
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
The Codes of Gender
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Sut Jhally
Naomi Klein
There's a bad mood rising against the corporate brands. No Logo is the warning on the label. In the last decade, No Logo has become a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As the world faces a second economic depression, No Logo's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever. Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. It tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Flirting with Danger: Power & Choice in Heterosexual Relationships
Sut Jhally, Andrew Killoy
Social and developmental psychologist and author Lynn Phillips explores the line between consent and coercion in this thought-provoking look at popular culture and the ways real girls and women navigate their heterosexual relationships and hookups.
Flirting with Danger: Power & Choice in Heterosexual Relationships
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life
Sut Jhally
Stuart Hall
In one of Stuart Hall's most famous lectures, Hall speaks with dazzling precision about the responsibilities of intellectuals in the face of undemocratic structures of power, injustice, racism, and inequality.
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life
On 'Orientalism'
Sut Jhally
Edward Said
Edward Said's book ORIENTALISM has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging (and lavishly illustrated) interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient." Said argues that the Western (especially American) understanding of the Middle East as a place full of villains and terrorists ruled by Islamic fundamentalism produces a deeply distorted image of the diversity and complexity of millions of Arab peoples.
On 'Orientalism'
Asking For It: the Ethics & Erotics of Sexual Consent
Tom Robertson, Scott Morris
The line between sexual consent and sexual coercion is not always as clear as it seems -- and according to Harry Brod, this is exactly why we should approach our sexual interactions with great care. Brod, a professor of philosophy and leader in the pro-feminist men's movement, offers a unique take on the problem of sexual assault, one that complicates the issue even as it clarifies the bottom-line principle that consent must always be explicitly granted, never simply assumed. In a nonthreatening, non-hectoring discussion that ranges from the meanings of "yes" and "no" to the indeterminacy of silence to the way alcohol affects our ethical responsibilities, Brod challenges young people to envision a model of sexual interaction that is most erotic precisely when it is most thoughtful and empathetic.
Asking For It: the Ethics & Erotics of Sexual Consent