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The Sociology of The Hunger Games Baruch Summer Leadership Academy Presented by Sara Zweig 7/17/12

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What is Science Fiction? Looks towards Future Deals with man-made products or events Often take place in worlds alternate to ours but still similar Shows how our wishes and societies are bound by ideology and production.

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Fantasy

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Science Fiction

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Fantasy Science Fiction Dragon Spaceship Magic Science Society Man-made

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Whats the Point? SF is literature of cognitive estrangement...whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the authors empirical environment. -Darko Suvin novum Frederic Jamesons Identity and Difference

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SciFi and Society Puts Identity and Difference at the heart of the plot. Allows reader/viewer to compare and contrast Introduces radically other possibilities

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The Hunger Games Summary

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Capital and Labor Capital and labor increasingly tend to exist in different spaces and times Manuel Castells, urban sociologist District 1 v. District 12 & 13 How do their home districts determine the tributes chances in the Hunger Games?

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Karl Marx 19 th century German philosopher Witness to the Industrial Revolution Said the everyday worker was suffering under industrialization and capitalism Worker = Thing, not a Person

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Alienation and Commodity Worker from Product Worker from Worker Worker from Work Worker from Self Commodity= object separated from mode of production

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Worker from Product What it must be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? (65).

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Worker From Work Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal- minersMan and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many who have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails (4).

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Worker From Worker the tesserae are just anotherway to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper (14). The capital will show the winning district giftswhile the rest of us battle starvation (19).

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Worker From Self I want to die as myselfI dont want them to change me (141). Tribute as Commodity

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False Consciousness

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False Consciousness Cntd.

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Madonna-Whore Dichotomy To win approval, we must be both sexy and wholesome, delicate but able to cope.

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Media and Spectacle Functions to promote false consciousness and state power Who are We?

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Media Reaction

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Media Continued Big Gov't? Or Against the 1%? Atlantic Monthly: "The Hunger Games offers the populist hero the Occupy movement wasn't able to deliver.... Katniss's awakening is political...When she strews flowers over a fallen friend's corpse, she seems, for the first time, alert to the systemic perversity of her situation. She gives a coded salute to viewers, her first act of rebellion. It works: Laborers in the dead tribute's district, most of whom are black, revolt against the Capitol's rule. One protestor is hosed against a wall, an allusion to the Birmingham campaign that may well slip past Katniss's teenage fans. But whether or not they recognize its specific references, The Hunger Games ' devotees clearly get the story's urgency, its now-ness."

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And More Media Keith Ablow, FOX News Psychologist 1) Females will be further distanced from their traditional feminine characteristics 2) Young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence 3) A few psychologically vulnerable teens who would have come to no good anyhow may be inspired to replicate the films violence.