Jackson Katz

Spin the Bottle offers an indispensable critique of the role that contemporary popular culture plays in glamorizing excessive drinking and high-risk behaviors. Award-winning media critics Jackson Katz and Jean Kilbourne contrast these distorted representations with the often disturbing and dangerous ways that alcohol consumption affects the lives of real young men and women. Illustrating their analysis with numerous examples, Katz and Kilbourne decode the power and influence these seductive media images have in shaping gender identity, which is linked to the use of alcohol. Nowhere is this link more cause for concern than on America's college campuses.

By exploring the college party scene, Spin the Bottle shows the difficulties students have in navigating a cultural environment saturated with messages about gender and alcohol. Interviews with campus health professionals provide a clear picture of how drinking impacts student health and academic performance, but it is the students' own experiences and reflections that tell the real story behind alcohol's alluring public image.

Spin the Bottle concludes with concrete strategies for countering the ubiquitous presence of alcohol propaganda and challenges young people to make conscious decisions about their own lives.… (altro)

While the social construction of femininity has been widely examined, the dominant role of masculinity has until recently remained largely invisible. Tough Guise is the first educational video geared toward college and high school students to systematically examine the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century.

In this innovative and wide-ranging analysis, Jackson Katz argues that widespread violence in American society, including the tragic school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and elsewhere, needs to be understood as part of an ongoing crisis in masculinity.

This exciting new media literacy tool-- utilizing racially diverse subject matter and examples-- will enlighten and provoke students (both males and females) to evaluate their own participation in the culture of contemporary masculinity.… (altro)