VISA 1500 Assignment 2, part A

Maria Jesus Castro Suarez

T00675825

VISA Assignment 2

Part A.-

This is a photo of “Sarah”, that is the name that this girl uses on her Instagram account (pastelpan.da), she is an influencer with 11k followers, she is very famous for the cosplays she does. This time, I’m going to analyze her cosplay of Velma, a character from the famous 1969 Scooby-Doo show.

She did not specify where she was going or what the reason was behind her disguise. She didn’t explain exactly why she decided to dress like this, but what she did mention is that Vilma is one of her favorite characters from her children’s shows.

Her costume looks homemade. She wore a specific hairstyle that is similar to the character, glasses, and also she combined some clothes that you can buy as “normal clothes”, not necessary for costume purposes; but she combined everything in a way that looks exactly like Vilma in Scooby-Doo.

This specific character of Vilma is a clear example of the stereotypes we have in our society and the way in which your appearance can make you part of a specific group. If we think of Vilma and her role in Scooby-Doo, we can say that she is a “nerd” and one of the best ways to give personality to a character is to make her personality match her appearance. For example, the fact that Vilma wears glasses has something to do with the concept that nerds wear glasses, very cliché but still in use these days. The way we dress is considered to say a lot about ourselves and “who we are”, but it shouldn’t be like that.

In class we talk a lot about the social construction of gender and how we assume that someone is something based on their appearance. Precisely the fact that we depend a lot on appearances causes many misunderstandings and we can get to misjudge something without even really knowing it.

This simple example of the glasses and how they are assigned the function of referencing that Velma is a nerd, made me think a lot about what we already learned in class. The media has been teaching us many things during all this time, even if we do not consciously realize it, the media has built the way we perceive the world and the assumptions we make, as a metaphor we can say that the media have put glasses on society and we see life through them until we realize it and we do something about it.

References:

• Leon, A. J. (2014). The Good, The Geek, and the Ugly: A Critical Examination of the Portrayal of Geek Women in Popular Media. Lehigh University.
• Giannini, E., & Woofter, K. for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?