Textual Analysis Essay

Textual Analysis of a transgressive text
Choose one example of a transgressive text and explore how it breaks cultural taboos
In this essay I am going to explain what textual analysis is and how it’s used to make sense of what we see and also understand who we are as individuals in a society. Then I will give a brief description of what a text is and the effect it has on its audience then I will explore how my chosen transgressive text breaks cultural taboos. I will pick out and use different movie scenes and explore how they break cultural taboos.
Textual analysis is a process of collecting information on how human beings operate and how they understand the world. Especially people of different subcultures, these researchers are trying to
More so, it’s a means used by media professionals to send out a message to their audience and to also try and play around or twist the way their audiences think into what they want them to think instead. Examples of these texts include movies in a cinema.
Transgressive texts in this context are movies or films or novels that are characterized by the representation of unacceptable behaviors that violate the norms or customs and religious beliefs of the society. They basically function against the taboos of certain cultures; these often involve drug abuse, sexual immorality, violence, murder, indecent language.
My chosen transgressive text is a cult film, ‘Night of the living dead’. I have chosen this particular category because it’s with no doubt one of the greatest horror movies George Romeo ever produced as it features scenes that are horrifying yet very influential and very distressing. It’s a low budget cult film that leaves the audience unsatisfied because the hero is killed in the end. Never the less its known for breaking cultural taboos as it features themes such as cannibalism, race, identity, gender and
It’s quite unusual for a black man to be a film’s main protagonist, because white race always take the leading roles in films as they consider themselves more superior. Harry and Sean, (2009, p6) In America today there is a general belief that each and every individual is unique and should have equal access to the American dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In other wards no one should be restricted from doing what makes them happy regardless of race or gender or class. More so, as the movie goes on we get to see a fight between Mr. Cooper and Ben over authority issues and again Mr. Cooper asks Ben that what makes him think that he knows what’s best for all of them. From time racism has always been a ground breaking problem and as a result it brings divisions and war making it a taboo breaker in this movie. Linda and Leon, (2014 p242) “Racism is based on the concept of whiteness- an identity concept invented and enforced by power and violence. Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being