The Feminist Discourse Community Regarding Advertising

Our reading for this week was Swales' "The Concept of a Discourse Community."  In the reading were six characteristics that made a Discourse Community function.  These characteristics were things that made sense, yet not completely obvious to someone who would just be browsing through a site used by the online community.

1: Commonly agreed public goals

This is a fairly obvious one for my community.  The online feminist community in general has several goals, but in a broad sense, the online feminist community is simply trying to eradicate the sexism present in our everyday lives.  More specifically, the Feminist Community concentrated on the portrayal of Women in Advertising is trying to achieve goals of ending oversexualization of female bodies, using the female body to sell products, and ending body-shaming by many companies, among many other goals.

Boots = naked? Thanks for clearing that up, UGG.

2: Mechanisms of Intercommunication

I was a little confused about how the reading described this, but I feel like it was describing ways that some communities didn't or were unable to interact.  However, I feel like this doesn't apply here, and what is going on in my community is just plain intercommunication.  Many blogs and forums exist for my online community and it is entirely possible for many people to be connected to a variety of them.  There certainly is a lot of overlap when it comes to people communicating because they may read subscribe to a blog, follow the blog's authors on Twitter, and communicate with the community in a variety of ways.  

3: Using Participatory Mechanisms to Primarily Provide Information and Feedback

This one definitely applies here--the whole point of my online community is to first, raise awareness about what is happening with women and advertising, and then come up with a solution to the problems that arise.  This is the information part.  The feedback part happens in two ways: 1. The online community provides feedback to these authors, Twitter accounts, even other commenters who are taking part in the online conversations by creating discussions on the subject at hand and 2. providing feedback to the companies which have caused offense to the community, or, sometimes providing positive feedback to companies who actually do a good job of representing women in advertising.  In these ways, the community is using their participatory mechanisms to improve the community and further continue toward their goals. 

4: Using Genres to Work Toward Goals (?)

The wording of this whole section is awkward to me.  I'm not really sure what the fourth goal means, I'm just interpreting it as using different ways of communication depending on the communication outlet to further work toward the community's goals.  If this is right, this would be the way that people in this community interact in areas such as blogs or Twitter.  It is definitely more beneficial to the community if the members comment on blogs and start conversations there, however, it is quicker for the community to simply retweet a link to a relevant article.  

5: Acquiring a Specific Lexis

Okay, this keeps getting worse.  I just had to look up what "lexis" means.  I'm guessing this is referring to the language that a community uses.  This is fairly simple (once you get past the complicated wording of the article).  One term that often comes up is "body-shaming".  This is basically the way that advertisers portray women in their advertisements to make real women feel inferior to the pictures/videos so that the women will buy their products in order to achieve the pictures perfection in the advertisement.  Many more terms exist, but this is the one that I have seen the most often lately.  

Young women aren't the only victims of body shaming--think of how often we see advertisements like these directed at middle-aged to older women. 

6: Members with Expertise 

This one is fairly simple.  Basically, the way this applies to my community is that the more experienced members of the community have kept their blogs and magazines alive--a lot have even grown to be more popular than they were at their beginnings.  Newer members to the community--such as myself--can go explore these larger areas of communication and learn more broader things about feminism before honing in on feminism and advertising.  Also, these experienced members will often link to the personal blogs, Twitter, or Facebook accounts of the network of other experienced members they have found to be relevant, interesting, etc.  This large network of experienced contributors has a large role to play in the success of the Feminist community regarding Advertising.