User:Anasilva00/sandbox

Contribution A (500 words)
Kpop

Racial and gender femininity has been present in Korean Pop and it can be observed, nowadays, even more. It is shown that there is a tendency for fans, females specially, to transform their unique character and body looks based on how their idols and role models appear or behave. Taking as an example Girl’s Generation music video named “The boys”, the video suggests and allows the viewers to perceive how their performances and dancing bodies create a connection between various races and genders. This provides an expectation of what the ideal femininity should look like. Gender and race are highly connected with sexuality, and this assumption has led, for example, to the racialization of the Asian body in the United States (Oh, 2014).

In addition to this, the Korean Pop industry and community has been very successful in providing a safe and open environment for queer people. By using makeup, wearing clothes considered more feminine and having behaviours or actions considered soft or even sweet (which are attitudes usually paired with females), K-pop male idols tend to deliver a more androgynous gender fluidity. This type of behaviour comes as a challenge to the regular white masculinity, as the same time as that it creates an opposition to the strict gender binaries currently exiting in the western culture, like homosexuality / heterosexuality and masculine / feminine body. Nowadays, it can be observed that K-pop male idols had a huge impact on queer community, making a safer, more secure and comfortable place for this people to be about their sexuality and body (Oh, 2015).

Along with this, the presence and appearance of BTS, a Korean pop boy group, in the #ENDviolence campaign is notable. This campaign fights for the awareness regarding the international cause of child protection, striving to end violence against children and young people. BigHit, which is BTS’s management and affiliated company combined with the UNICEF organization which led to the creation of the Love Yourself Campaign. This aims to call attention to people, particularly the younger generations, about the significance and value of self-love. As a result of this partnership, on September 2018, the United Nations General Assembly, invited the Korean BTS group to give a speech about this topic (UNICEF, n.d.).

Lastly, it is also important to note the impact provided by the Korean Wave in nowadays’ global digital age. Soompi.com and Allkpop.com are some of the examples of English based websites that were built as a platform meant to inform its millions of non-Korean viewers about the newest information and gossip, as well as the industry’s events. Also, this rising curiosity about the K-pop industry caused a increasing on the country’s tourism, given that foreigners are provided with an opportunity to discover more about their idols costumes and lifestyle, as well as, to visit places related to K-Pop and find about the country’s culture. Furthermore, young generations have showed a huge urge of taking expensive and private lessons just to learn the newest K-pop dances. At last, in London’s Trafalgar Square, fans have organized flash mobs with the aim to attract their favourite idols shows on their city (Kim, 2013).

Bibliography - Kim, Y., (2013). The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global. [ebook] Routledge. Available at:  - Oh, C., (2014). The Politics Of The Dancing Body: Racialized And Gendered Femininity In Korean Pop. [ebook] New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:  - Oh, C., (2015). Queering spectatorship in K-pop: The androgynous male dancing body and western female fandom. The Journal of Fandom Studies, [online] Available at:  - UNICEF, n.d. BTS supports #ENDviolence. [online] Available at: 

Contribution B (500 words)
Minority Groups

A case study was made where its main focus was to find out the main divergences between the LGBT homeless teenagers’ community and their heterosexual peers in regard to both mental and physical health issues. In this case study, 84 samples of LGBT adolescents were paired with 84 samples of heterosexual adolescents, having in consideration their age and acknowledged gender identity. Further, taking into account a wide variety of psychosocial aspects, these two parties of samples were analysed and differentiated. As a result of these analysis, the main outcomes stated that the LGBT younger generations have the most probability of experiencing psychological difficulties which can be a consequence of the verbal and physical abuse that this community is vulnerable to experience, as well as victimization, substance using and higher risk of prostitution or dangerous sexual behaviours. Thus, the study revealed that the LGBT homeless teenager’s community shows a higher likeliness of possessing negative psychological and physical factors regarding their health and a higher necessity of professional help programmes later on (Bryan et al., 2002).

As another point of view, the prevention and care of HIV / AIDS must be studied having in account social inclusion and sexual diversity. As higher the sexual exclusion, the higher the probability of HIV diagnosis and transmission, along side with all the negative consequences and health diseases. Sexual minorities have been proved to have HIV in a larger scale, which highlights that the world’s acknowledged and understanding about this matter is fundamental to decrease and prevent the risk of LGBT communities in regard to this disease. Furthermore, it is possible to observe that, in today’s world, some rights are being denied due to sexualities exclusion (Caceras et al., 2008).

As these issues start to rise, many campaigns, petitions and manifests are being utilized to fight and prevent the spreading of serious matters like sexual harassment and abuse, LGBTQ+ discrimination and racism. The #MeToo Movement was a campaign founded by Tarana Burke that aimed to create a safer space for victims of sexual assault to tell their stories (Gill and Rahman, 2020). The BLM movement (Black Lives Matter) gained a lot of recognition and many people went to the streets with the aim of combating white oppressors and end racism. The face of this movement was Alicia Garza (Black Lives Matter, 2020). Regarding the LGBTQ+ community many manifests were made all over the world, in order to create awareness on the discrimination and lack of respect suffered by this social group. One of the biggest influencers to aid the community is RuPaul, specially in the drag community. His show RuPaul’s Drag Race started in 2009 when this subject was still not socially accepted. Nowadays, the tv show expanded the awareness of the community, providing representation on the tv screens.

Bibliography - Black Lives Matter, 2020. Her Story. [online] Available at:  - Bryan N. Cochran, Angela J. Stewart, Joshua A. Ginzler, Ana Mari Cauce, “Challenges Faced by Homeless Sexual Minorities: Comparison of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Homeless Adolescents with Their Heterosexual Counterparts”, American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (May 1, 2002): pp. 773-777. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447160/ - Caceras, C. F., et al. (2008). "Sexual Diversity, Social Inclusion and HIV/AIDS." AIDS. 22(2): 45-55. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329729/pdf/nihms313885.pdf - Gill, G. and Rahman-Jones, I., 2020. Me Too founder Tarana Burke: Movement is not over. BBC, [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-53269751

Response to my peer's Contribution A (250 words)
Social Media Marketing - Omar-Adel99

Instagram is one of the most famous platforms among the younger generation. This social media platform allows people and companies to expose their products and to advertise them. These advertisements can be seen everywhere in different design arrangements and can be done from sponsored stories or posts. Famous people and celebrities tend to make partnerships and collaborations with different enterprises, where they show and rate a certain free product delivered to them in exchange for marketing, therefore increasing the sales of the said product. Since Instagram users tend to be influenced by the people they follow on the app, this kind of ads have a great success on the number of sales, being way higher than advertisements on television, for example. Also, Instagram uses algorithmic technology, this meaning that this social media analysis, through profile visits and likes, the costumers likes and tastes showing each user only personalized and customized compatible ads.

Bibliography -	Miles, J., 2014. Instagram Power. [ebook] Available at: &lt;http://videoplus.vo.llnwd.net/o23/digitalsuccess/SUCCESS%20Book%20Summaries/2014%20March%20SBS/InstagramPower_Review.pdf&gt; -	Whitney, M., 2021. The Complete Guide to Advertising on Instagram. [Blog] WordStream, Available at: &lt;https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/11/20/Instagram-advertising&gt;

Response to my peer's Contribution B (250 words)
Internet Celebrity - SaraM121

Youtube was, for many years, one of the biggest entertainment platforms. However, in the last two years TikTok has been changing this situation. Since TikTok provides people with a free and youthful image, many teenagers turned to this social media app. With this, several content creators came to conflict over the audience and that generated an issue. This rose because what is considered a famous YouTuber counts with not much more than one million followers, yet, on TikTok a famous TikToker would easily have at least ten million followers. In 2021, YouTubers and TikTokers came together to the idea of creating a social event named Social Gloves, where YouTubers would compete on a boxing match against TikTokers. Many fans were willing to pay a lot of money to go to this event. Austin McBroom, the founder of the Ace Family who counts with 19 million followers on YouTube, was the main character of this event, as for TikTok, with 20 million followers, Bryce Hall was the opposing counter part.

Bibliography - LiveXLive. 2021. Social Gloves: Battle of the Platforms - YouTubers vs. TikTokers on LiveXLive. [online] Available at: 