University Writing Program

Home / Write Now! / 2019-2020 / Zoe Hermer-Cisek / Transgender People in Advertisements, Transnormativity, and Corporate Wokeness

Transgender People in Advertisements, Transnormativity, and Corporate Wokeness

by Zoe Hermer-Cisek

Research Essay | UWS 16a Sex and Advertising | Doug Kirshen | Fall 2019

About this paper | This paper as PDF: MLA format

Very little has been written about the way that trans people have been represented in advertising. This is likely due to the relative newness of ads featuring trans characters and to the number of ads remaining few. Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai’s 2010 article about LGBT representation in advertising, including a section about trans representation, remains one of the few published works on the subject. However, the social and political landscapes around queer identities have changed drastically since then, and, along with them, the advertising landscape. Ads with explicitly queer characters and themes are on the rise, especially for products that use “more edgy, unconventional advertising” (Tsai).

This increase in visibility could have an enormous impact on both transgender (trans) and cisgender (cis) individuals because of the way that media, including advertising, help construct definitions of gender. The way that trans people are depicted in ads is important to examine critically because “Media representations provide easily accessible representations of transgender people and thus serve as the culturally available knowledge that structures our understanding of transgender identities and experiences” (Johnson 485-86). Queer people inevitably compare themselves to queer depictions in ads, and ads reinforce standards that are used to prove authentic queerness (Tsai). Studies on transgender youth have suggested that media helps shape transgender identities, and even that media is often the first place children learn about transgender people (Johnson 472). Studies on LGB youth further show that positive depictions of queer people in media provide role models for them (Johnson 472). Advertising can be interpreted as an “official sanction from Corporate America” (Tsai), and so depictions of trans people could do a lot to help the community gain acceptance. Inclusion in ads is a form of societal validation, something to which most trans people have little access, so it could also positively impact trans individuals’ self-esteem. However, advertisers have a vested interest in not rocking the boat too much, as that could offend more people than attract. According to Tsai, advertisers use queer images in order to project an exotic appeal, something far enough from mainstream ads to be interesting, but not too far as to be alienating. Queer ads don’t “challenge heterosexual and patriarchal domination” (Tsai). Contemporary ads use transgender people to project brand progressiveness, while not upending traditional binary ideas of gender.

A good example of the few ads with trans characters outside the past few years is the “High School Reunion” ad from Holiday Inn (Tsai). In it, a woman enters her reunion, and as her old classmates stare at her body, a voiceover announces the costs of various plastic surgeries that she had done. A man stops her and tries to guess who she is, and the audience sees his look of horror as he realizes he’s hitting on “Bob? Bob Johnson?” The voiceover then delivers the punchline: that if this can be done with a few thousand, imagine what a billion dollar remodel to Holiday Inn will do. The punchline is also that the man thought he was talking to a cis woman, and both punchlines are at the expense of trans women through the implication that they are not real women. Bait-and-switch ads that used transgender women as a cheap joke were the only kind of mainstream ad that featured trans women in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tsai’s article “Assimilating the Queers,” contextualizes this ad in a pattern of trans women depicted as hyper-feminine and sexualized, and as deceiving men into being attracted to them by passing as cis women. “High School Reunion” is also typical in that the trans person featured is a woman; at the time there were no mainstream ads with trans men or nonbinary people (Tsai). Tsai also notes that these ads focused on elements of the transition process, such as plastic surgery in the Holiday Inn ad. The focus on the methods trans women use to appear more feminine (clothing, surgery, etc.), followed by the revelation of their birth sex, frames their womanhood as a façade (Tsai). The focus on plastic surgery also plays into a medical essentialist definition of being trans, meaning that in order for a trans person’s gender to be respected, they have to undergo medical transition. This essentialism both feeds into cissexism and reinforces the gender binary by upholding a biological definition of gender. The sexualization of trans women in ads like the Holiday Inn ad also reinforces patriarchal gender roles by depicting their gender as legitimate only when attracting male attention.

Recent ads featuring trans characters depart significantly from the trends set up by the ads of the 1990s and 2000s. Rather than only depicting trans women, they use men and, to a lesser extent, nonbinary people. Trans people are also not sexualized, nor do the ads focus on medical methods of transition. Most importantly, ads do not use trans women as a cheap bait-and-switch punchline. Just as public policy and attitudes towards trans people have shifted since the late 90s, so have the acceptable ways to depict them, including in advertisements. Advertisements now often show trans people through the lens of “transnormativity,” a term coined by Austin H. Johnson in 2016, which reinforces cisnormative ideas of gender. Transnormativity describes a set of standards used by both cis and trans people to evaluate the authenticity of a person’s trans-ness by putting their experiences and expression of gender in a “hierarchy of legitimacy” (Johnson 466). These standards include knowing from childhood that their gender assigned at birth was incorrect, that they perform traditional gender expressions, and that their goal is to transition not just socially, but through hormones and surgery (Johnson 461-480). Kay Siebler has also noted this fixation with medical transition and following traditional gender roles in her 2012 paper about online interactions in the trans community (83-87). Transnormativity is deeply rooted in the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria — an incongruence between a person’s gender and gender assigned at birth — which in turn allows access to social, legal, and medical gender affirmation (Johnson 484).

Advertisers use transnormative narratives that convey most widely acceptable ways to perform being trans, much in the same way that most advertisements depict traditional gender roles for cisgender men and women. Transnormativity reinforces the gender binary by emphasizing that the way to be taken seriously as a trans person is to conform to traditional gender roles and to medically transition. In our society, where gender is so strongly tied to correct performance, an ambiguous gender presentation makes it hard or impossible for a trans person to convince people around them of their gender. The onus put on passing, especially when combined with the way medical transition is pushed as a way to pass, codes trans bodies as something that needs to be fixed (Johnson 479, Siebler 85). Making medical transition the correct way to be a certain gender upholds the traditional binary and cisnormative ideology where biology decides gender, and where biology can only put a person in one of two categories (Capuzza and Spencer 216, Johnson 480, Siebler 84). So rather than putting chips into the binary understanding of gender through the inclusion of trans people, who have ostensibly broken that system, the depictions work to subtly reinforce it. Just as depictions of traditional gender roles for men and women reinforce their limitations, transnormative depictions of trans people enforce limiting definitions of trans expression. However, even narrow representations of trans people are still outside the mainstream because of the ongoing debates around trans issues. Simply having a trans person or storyline in an ad can be considered socially progressive.

In an ad from Gillette, a teenage trans man, Samson, shaves his face for the first time, guided by his father. This ad fits neatly into a transnormative narrative. Samson talks about how he always knew he was different and that, “growing up I was always trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to become,” feeding in to the accepted idea that all trans people are supposed to know that they are trans from a young age (Dad Helps Transgender). Although it is not explicitly mentioned, he is evidently taking testosterone, evidenced by needing to shave his beard and his voice having dropped. He says, “I’m glad I’m at the point [in my transition] that I’m able to shave.” This implies that the proper way to transition as a trans man is to develop male secondary sex characteristics through hormone replacement therapy, falling into the medical essentialist definition of being trans. Some traditional men’s gender roles are emphasized as well in the ad, including the father/son bond.

Absolut Vodka put out an ad featuring a transgender-related storyline as well, but from the point of view of a cisgender person. An unnamed man sees an old friend while out clubbing, and he recognizes her even though she’s transitioned. He tries to make an excuse to “get away” but she takes his hand and leads him through a great night at the club, as well as through her story, while they enjoy Absolut Vodka. This ad also presents the transnormative idea that all trans people know from a young age, as Darla “had always felt this way,” as well as making her appearance very feminine. However, the ad also has heavy subtext about the brand’s wokeness, its awareness of social issues relating to inequality and its sympathy towards those issues. The script walks the audience through the man’s process as the audience surrogate, learning to accept his old friend for who she is and understand that she is the “same person, same heart.” The ad is told from the cisgender character’s perspective and in past tense; he repeats to the audience what she told him (rather than having her speak) making him into a kind of guide as well as a surrogate. She guides him to tolerance, and he in turn guides the audience. At the end of the ad, he says, “she hadn’t changed; I had,” which puts the emphasis on his journey to acceptance while downplaying her journey. The trans character is used as a prop to try to send a message of acceptance to the audience, as well as a message of the brand’s acceptance.

Pantene also put out an advertisement that reads both as a show of support for the trans community and as a statement about the company’s wokeness. A number of different queer people, including multiple trans and gender-ambiguous people, dance while text on the screen states “don’t hate me because I’m gay,” along with similar statements about other queer identities, including transgender and nonbinary. At the end of the commercial, the text changes to “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” which older viewers will recognize as an old Pantene slogan. While this ad is the only one that features a nonbinary person, or that shows trans people interacting within their community, rather than just with cis people, it stops short of asking for acceptance. Rather, it only asks for the queer community not to be hated. Admittedly, labeling queer people, especially trans people, as beautiful is still a radical statement. However, the positive message is brought down by the rest of the ad’s statements about not hating people simply for their gender or sexual orientation. The lighthearted attitude of the ad, with bright colors and dancing, implies that queer life, including trans life, will continue unhindered even if there is hatred — something which, unfortunately, is often impossible.

All of these ads seem to be aimed at socially conscious consumers who want the brands they buy to be socially conscious as well. Customers can feel good about buying these companies’ products as a surrogate for, or as part of, supporting the same stances. However, the ads don’t necessarily address the important issues or the ones that are the current focus of trans activism; the “don’t hate me” message of the Pantene ad is out of sync with a community has turned to working for acceptance rather than lack of hatred. The ads focus instead on stories that seem and are progressive on their face, but they don’t affirm much more than the neutral statement that trans people exist.

Trans people are also encouraged by these ads to buy products simply because the brand has trans representation in their marketing, something that is still extremely rare. According to Siebler, “The Internet feeds trans people the notion that gender means capitalist consumption” (94). This is even more true for advertisements, because their explicit goal is to push consumption of a product. Siebler notes that “the consumer not only refuses to realize [they are] being manipulated to purchase products, but also the individual associates product consumption with [their] identity” (82). In the Gillette ad, the razor they are selling is defined as a symbol of true manhood, something that trans men are told to chase endlessly in order to prove their gender. The message of the ad then becomes: our product will help you be a real man

Interestingly, none of the recent ads (with the possible exception of the ad from Gillette) push a medical essentialist narrative of being trans. Neither surgery or hormones are ever explicitly mentioned, nor do the ads focus heavily on the bodies of the trans people they show. This is very different from other media with trans representation, such as TV series, documentaries, and online videos. Documentaries on trans men highlight their medical transitions: hormone replacement therapy, double mastectomies, phalloplasties, or combinations thereof, all as part of becoming a true man in their eyes and in the eyes of the law (Johnson 479-481). As of 2017, a high proportion of trans characters in TV shows were in the process of, or planned to surgically transition, or had done so already (Capuzza and Spencer 223). On YouTube, trans people make videos showing their bodies pre and post-op as part of proving their gender and that they are really trans (Siebler 85-86). Siebler goes so far to as to say that “New media may support alternative genders, but only those alternative genders that require the assistance of hormones and surgery” (94). Therefore, it is notable that there is such little focus on the body in these ads. There is more focus on clothing than on than the body underneath, possibly because it is more lucrative to commodify things that cisgender people also buy than to commodify medical transition and risk alienating a large portion of the market.

While the greater inclusion of trans people in advertising is an encouraging sign of acceptance, that inclusion is based on narrow parameters. First, trans people are depicted through a transnormative lens that does not challenge binary ideas of gender. Second, they are used as tools to show the audience that the brand is woke in order to attract socially conscious consumers. These narrow parameters of representation can impact the trans community as well as greater society, because the media creates definitions of gender. Media also makes standards that people are taught to compare themselves against, which makes transnormative depictions become a feedback loop. These ads, which imply that there is only a narrow way to be considered legitimate as a trans person, or use trans people simply as a symbol of progressiveness, limit how viewers think about transness, regardless of their gender.

Works Cited

“AbsolutNights—Darla." YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=x-__yclKdyw. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.

Capuzza, Jamie C., and Leland G. Spencer. “Regressing, Progressing, or Transgressing on the Small Screen? Transgender Characters on U.S. Scripted Television Series.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2, Informa UK Limited, Routledge, 2016, pp. 214–230. doi:10.1080/01463373.2016.1221438.

"Dad Helps Transgender Son Shave Face for First Time in New Gillette Ad." YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=AR-JkiNQ_Ro. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

Holiday Inn, "High School Reunion." YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=cd5NvbYoMz8&list=PLuvI7WrAZruHqJ9jWWKoUO4w28PbUGtUF&index=4&t=0s. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

Johnson, Austin H. “Transnormativity: A New Concept and Its Validation through Documentary Film About Transgender Men.” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 86, no. 4, Wiley-Blackwell, Nov. 2016, pp. 465–91. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/soin.12127.

Pantene Pride Commercial. YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=_wNHDq-7zuc. Accessed 23 Mar. 2020.

Siebler, Kay. “Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries in the Digital Age.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, vol. 16, no. 1, Taylor & Francis Ltd, Jan. 2012, pp. 74–99. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/19359705.2012.632751.

Tsai, Wan-Hsiu Sunny. “Assimilating the Queers: Representations of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgender People in Mainstream Advertising.” Advertising & Society Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Advertising Educational Foundation, Apr. 2010. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/asr.0.0042.

About This Paper

Expand All

Assignment

Research Paper Assignment

Instructions. Write a 10-12 page paper using at least four scholarly sources that relates to the themes of the course—namely intersections of advertising with sexuality and/or gender You are not required to stick precisely to the project and sources you presented in your research proposal, but if you plan to deviate from it substantially you should discuss it with me. You are not prohibited from using non-scholarly sources, but you are responsible for the quality of the sources you choose. If you use a dissertation or thesis as a source, make sure it is for a doctoral degree; do not use undergraduate papers as sources! As always, you must evaluate sources to determine their quality and usefulness. For every source, you must know who wrote it, what their qualifications are, and what their point of view or biases are likely to be.

This is a thesis-driven paper. As in the lens paper, you must take a stand, a position on some issue, and it must be motivated—in other words, you must convince the reader why it is important to find out what you have to say about it. You must also locate your argument relative to an ongoing discourse on the same or a similar topic. What contribution is your paper making to that discourse? Keep in mind that this is your paper—not your sources’! When you summarize, paraphrase, or quote from a source, always make clear how that evidence fits into your argument. You can support or challenge any source’s arguments, as long as you present evidence of your own to support your stance. Put your sources into a conversation with each other and with you. Think carefully about what ads you want to focus on: decide on a small group, show how they are related, and examine them in depth. Write more about less: ten pages is a very short paper. You must define your topic narrowly enough to do justice to it.

Audience. Think of your audience for this paper as members of the class who have done the readings and assignments.

Citation. Use APA format.

Cover Letter for Draft

With the rough draft of your essay, you are required to write a cover letter, addressed to your readers, in which you reflect on your process, answer the following questions and present any other concerns.

What point are you at with this draft? If you had more time, what more would you do?
What is your thesis? (quote it from the draft)
What is your motive? (quote it from the draft)
What are the biggest problems you’re having at this point in the writing process?
What is your favorite sentence? What is your least favorite? Why? (Quote directly from draft.)
What is your #1 concern about your essay—sources, thesis, structure, evidence, persuasiveness, style, and so on?

Revision Cover Letter

Reflect on your re-thinking and revision process from the draft to the final version. Write a cover letter describing this process and turn it in electronically with the final version of your paper.

What did you set out to accomplish in this revision? Do you feel you succeeded?
How did your thesis or motive change? Please explain. Note: you must show change or development of your thesis since the draft.
What steps or stages did you go through in your revision process?
Did you use the Writing Center? If so, please describe your experience.
Comment on the pre-draft, peer review process, and your conference with the instructor. Were these helpful to you? What could have been done to improve them?
Please add any further comments.
Please do not resubmit your Draft Cover Letter.

Video: Interview with the Author and Instructor

Interview Transcript

Zoe Hermer-Cisek and instructor Doug Kirshen discussed Zoe’s paper with James Mandrell, Director of the University Writing Program.

James Mandrell: Hi I'm James Mandrell director of the University Writing Program and I'm here today with Zoe Hermer-Cisek and Professor Douglas Kirshen to talk about Zoe's paper "Transgender People in Advertisements, Transnormativity, and Corporate Wokeness" which they [Zoe]wrote for a University Writing Seminar with the topic of Sex and Advertising. Why don't we start with Professor Kirshen. Doug, can you tell us a little bit about your UWS topic, and this assignment and what you were hoping students would be able to do with it.

Doug Kirshen: Sure, Jim. So Sex and Advertising‚ sex obviously gets people's attention and advertising turns out to be a great way to teach close reading. There's a lot to see an advertisement, more than one person can see, even watching a good ad over and over, and if you think about a million dollar Super Bowl ad ... a lot of care goes into that. Nothing is nothing is left to chance there. So it's a good way to teach close reading and then besides that all advertising is ideological, it always teaches values, so once you figure out everything you can see or notice in it, then there's still more to talk about because you can think about what values is this is teaching me, how is it telling me to behave as a human being?

James Mandrell: Zoe, could you tell us a bit about the topic of your paper and how it developed.

Zoe Hermer-Cisek: Going very much off of what Professor Kirshen just said, I was really interested in looking at the way that advertising teaches gender and proper gender roles and norms. As well as the ways that men and women are portrayed in advertising tends to be very traditional and by the numbers, and I was really originally curious about whether or not there had been any portrayals of non-binary people. So looking at how people between the binary were portrayed in advertising, since they didn't fit into either of those like regimented norms. From there, I found there really weren't many to speak of, so I couldn't build a whole paper around that, and so I went to just transgender people generally and advertising and looking at how transgender people are portrayed in ads.

James Mandrell: You took away my follow up question because I was wondering if there were many transgender people in advertisements at this moment in time, because I don't recall seeing many and you answered that for me. But following up a bit, could you speak about how you get started on a paper, more generally, and about your process of writing and revising.

Zoe Hermer-Cisek: I have a pretty a pretty regular way that I do research papers, I like doing a lot of research, before I start building writing anything so a lot of my process was just trying to find ads that fit my topic, which was fairly hard. So a lot of what I had to do was find news stories reacting to those ads and then going back and then finding the ads they were talking about. I also tried searching different trans celebrities and trying to see if they had done advertising so it's like trying to pivot into a different way of trying to find the ads and then trying to find papers written about transgender people in advertising was very difficult, I only found one piece written on that, I think that was written in the very early 2000s so things have changed quite a bit since that paper was written, so I ended up using it more as an introductory piece looking at how things had been and then my paper was more about how they are now.

For writing what I tend to do is I’ll take a bunch of notes about each piece, many of them I don't even end up using they're just kind of to keep my thoughts straight. And then I'll color code the notes, so one color for each source and that keeps it so that I don't end up plagiarizing anything if it came from another source it's in [another] color, and so I can't mess that up and I can't accidentally cite it to a different source, and so I do my own notes and my own thoughts in black and then I can keep those separate and I end up just kind of writing a bulleted list of everything that I need to say in the paper, and that also allows me to move things around. So if I want to switch up a couple of different points I can just take the bullet note drag it up drag it down and then I take all my notes and turn them into sentences, paragraphs, reorder things, restructure and then edit it as a final paper.

James Mandrell: You mentioned that taking notes is a way of thinking about the paper for you and, and I find that when I write I'm actually kind of thinking on paper as well. Did your ideas evolve or change while you were writing and, if so, in what ways?

Zoe Hermer-Cisek: Yeah things changed for me fairly drastically after finding one of my sources by Austin Johnson who coined the term transnormativity, and it was something that, as a trans person myself, I had known about just as a function of going through society but I hadn't known the word for it or read it as a structured way of viewing the world and it's kind of like a lens to look at stuff through, so finding his paper and finding that term really allowed me to clarify the way that I was thinking about these ads. His paper was on specifically trans men in documentaries so things were a bit different, and I did have to pivot his ideas a bit to fit advertising, rather than more factual retellings but that did really allow me to clarify my thoughts about things and kind of hone in more generally on a specific topic, instead of just trying to bring in too many different ideas.

James Mandrell: I want to follow up on the question of sources, you mentioned that there wasn't a lot of material for you to find but you found an article from the early aughts. I'm wondering, though, are you finding do you find that discussions of transformativity or transgender people to be more common on the Internet at this moment in time, instead of in print sources and, if so, how did you negotiate working with online sources?

Zoe Hermer-Cisek: Yes, I have definitely found a lot more information on trans theory and trans thought online I didn't end up finding much of anything about advertising, though, interestingly. Most of the sources, I found that weren't scholarly sources were written in like magazines or newspapers and they tended to be also written by cis-gender people more reacting to how like nouvaux it is to be seeing trans people in advertising and not really honing in and looking at the way that people are being portrayed. So I didn't end up using pretty much any of those sources and they tended to be more cursory and reacting more to the fact that there was a trans person in an ad and not really looking at more specifically what that was doing in the ad.

James Mandrell: Okay, thank you. What advice would you have for future students doing this kind of assignment and what suggestions, would you have for them, maybe with respect to topics they might want to explore?

Zoe Hermer-Cisek: I think that, and this is advice that I've gotten from many people, … pick a topic that you're going to be okay living with for like a month. Because if you start writing something and you're already a little bored with it, by the time that you're done with the research problem you're not going to love writing the paper because you're going to be dealing with it for another couple of weeks by that point. So I think that picking a topic that you're really interested in and also something that you might not already know a bit about, that's going to make the research, paradoxically, a bit easier, because everything that you know is in the research that you're doing currently, and you don't have to go back and find things that you had found maybe like a year earlier, a month earlier.

I also think that finding just a way that works for outlining, I find that that's where I tend to do most of my writing, and most of my thinking and then finding a way to make sure that all of your notes stay organized in a way that works for you and also keeping all of the sources separate and so you can go back and not have to worry about accidentally plagiarizing, or Oh, where did I get that idea where if I find that it's all in your notes already.

James Mandrell: I think those are three excellent pieces of advice and I give the same advice about picking a topic to people as well, that if you don't enjoy what you're working on by the end of the project you're going to be really, really miserable and it inevitably turns up in what you're writing. But I also think touching on outlining or figuring out how you want the paper to develop is critical, as well as organization. I think organization is just so important, particularly when you're working with a number of different sources, so thank you for those three important points. Doug, I'm turning to you again, could you tell us What surprised you about Zoe's paper why you were so engaged with it.

Doug Kirshen: Well, I wasn't at all surprised that Zoe had a lot of interesting things a lot of interesting ideas, a lot of things to say. This was actually the second paper, this was the research paper, so there had been a lens paper prior to this and in that paper Zoe actually had more than could fit into the paper and the difficulties were in trying to figure out what to put in and what to take out to make it fit. So I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the research paper came out in in terms of just being a very neatly organized package, a really elegant piece of work. Two things that really helped in that were coming up with two really good hooks. The transnormativity [concept] which is something that could kind of wrap around the whole paper. And then you had another hook, which was about corporate wokeness and how corporations, maybe sort of using non-heteronormative people in general and trans people in particular to serve their agendas —and then, what do we think about that. Between those [two hooks], you had something that really organized everything and brought it together very nicely, so that was really impressive.

James Mandrell: So, in other words, it was a satisfying paper for the author and the reader I think that those are two really important things. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness in terms of the answers to the questions and I was just wondering if there's anything either one of you would like to add, as we close up. I think that the lens paper that was earlier really helped me in the writing of it, I hadn't ever had to find sources that didn't neatly fit with what I was writing before and I think that really helped me kind of grow as a researcher and learn how to apply more disparate tools to work for my own writing, and for my own purposes and that really helped me a lot. In this particular paper trying to find writing on something that hadn't really been written about much before and so that was really useful for me.

James Mandrell: I think that's really important that's the case in some respects the difficulty of being original that when you're finding new things, or when you're approaching a new topic, you're not going to find evidence or supporting sources that are going to touch on what you're doing, so you have to find a way to translate or negotiate between what's been done and your new ideas which you really did successfully in this paper, and I think that's an important thing to learn. Doug did you have anything that you wanted to add?

Doug Kirshen: Just keep open to new ideas, be intellectually curious, and don't stop that when you're writing your paper. If you can do that and be open to making connections that are different and not obvious and therefore have a richer range of [ideas] to bring into your research paper, that's quite a thing to be able to learn, and it's something I think we all aspire to.

James Mandrell: Well I'd like to thank both of our guests and I hope you enjoyed listening to what they had to say about this paper it's an example of the fine work that's being done in our university writing seminars and I'm grateful to both Zoe and Professor Kirshen for joining us.