Three articles about...the abnormal

We read three separate articles for class at the beginning of the month that were very interesting: The Performance Art is for the Birds: Jackass 'Extreme Sports, and the De(con)struction of Gender, Charmed School, and lastly Guys Gone Wild? Soft-Core Video Profetionalism and New Realities in Television Production.

First I will begin with the Jackass article. Many of us have seen Jackass and the stunts that they pull, all of which are supervised by proffesionals, but yet they seem so "fun" to do. The critisism with this program is that it is all white males and they turn violence (a manly thing) into a laughable matter. Juddith Buttler argues that gender is a performance in itslef. He means that men have to act like men to make it believable to others that they are truly men.

The next article discussed the show Charmed School. In this show, the girls from The Flava of Love that did not win were sent to this school. The objective was to turn them back into "real" women. The article argues that, during the reality show that they were previously on, the girls were morphed into these inhuman ghosts of their former selves. If the girls failed at any of their tasks then they would be forced out of the school and back into society to try and reconfigure their lives on their own.
The last article was about the infamous soft-core videos Girls Gone Wild. The article discusses how men are the only ones filming (obviousy), and that they are somewhat of creeps for hounding drunken teenagers for their breasts. It is for man's entertainment that these videos are shot. Construction of gender is obviousy present with all of these articles in their own way.