My project has to do with gender inequality on college campuses. Specifically, I researched the gender inequality on Santa Clara University’s (SCU) campus through the student-run newspaper, The Santa Clara. Through this research, I found that the men would write articles about women without giving them an opportunity to share their opinions and personal experience. They were speaking for the women in a condescending tone which would usually belittle the women. So, in order to try and change this negative situation into something a little more positive, I decided to make my multimodal composition in the form of a newspaper.
I decided to make a newspaper because I knew that I would have a larger audience if I did that. Sometimes, the more technologically savvy that a person makes their project, the harder it can be for older generations to relate to. On the other hand, newspapers are easy to follow and understand. I also wanted to make a newspaper because all of my main sources that I used were from the SCU newspaper. However, I struggled with deciding on how I wanted it to look. Although at first I thought that I wanted it to look like an “old time” newspaper from back when coeducation was first starting at SCU, I realized that I wanted to bring this issue to light in a 21st century context, so I made the newspaper look like one would look today. As we still live in a very patriarchal society, it seems to be that everything is, and always has been, from the male’s perspective, which is why I titled it, “The Male Perspective”. That is also why I put the newspaper as Volume 200,000 (because humans have been on the planet earth for 200,000 years), and the Issue as 152 (because there have been about 152 days in this year so far).
The actual articles in my newspaper themselves were also very important. The main article’s information included what my research was about and pointed out the discrepancy between how little women’s voices were (and are still) heard as compared to men’s, which is why I included the picture that I took of the man treating the woman as a puppet on strings. I wanted to show that men truly spoke for women, and by doing so were able to control and manipulate issues into a one-sided story (and therefore campus culture) where women were not represented. I also made this picture black and white so that it looked even more grim, and really emphasized the seriousness of the situation. The other three article titles are taken from The Santa Clara, and are the three main articles that I used in my research paper. Below, I briefly summarized each article and explained how it did not allow women a chance to speak their mind or allow for their voices and problems to be heard.