The documentary-controversy essay
In this essay you will have chosen a particular news-story, or news-event, that features different stakeholders about an issue, or series of related issues, about which you yourself don’t have a polarized, black-and-white, editorial stance. This issue, though probably local, no doubt has correspondences or ramifications that reverberate far beyond the particular time and place where it occurs, occurred, or is still occuring. It will contain with it issues that transcend the particular story, in other words. Your work is to curate, frame & contextualize, the different voices and positions as well as the facts in question. As you follow the reverberations of how this controversy transcends into larger themes and issues, the possible range of voices and pieces of evidence will also of course broaden. Your beginning needs to articulate the complexity of the problem so that your reader knows what you are to be reckoning with. Your ending section needs to take up the different threads, nuances, and stances, to make sense of them together, so as to figure out and describe the complexity of the situation, in which your own idea, or stake, should be finally crystallized (This doesn’t mean that you just emerge on stage and say whatever you think; you need not even refer to “I” as you end your essay.” 8-9 pages, no more or less.
The topic/controversy I chose to talk about is the sex doll industry. The essay must address the stakeholders in this and the ramifications on the present and future. Married couples, relationships, people creating the dolls in the creepy factories. The essay should start with a eery/detailed word picture describing a sex doll factory in detail to shock the reader.
The essay should ask questions about the morality of all of this and whatever the writer can think of. If the writer could chose 3-4 sources…recent news articles, movies and books to progress the essay, that would be perfect. The sources should eventually lead to the “bigger ramifications” of the sex doll industry’s growth. Other interesting things to talk about are sex doll companies making “children like dolls…”
Will empathy in sex be changed? How will this affect current society. Finally, there must be a works cited page for all sources used.
