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Gender, Media, and Pop Culture (WGSS 1140)
Total Credits:
3
Lecture Credits:
3
Description:
This course explores the powerful effects of popular literary, artistic, mass and digital media cultures on our lives. You will study how social norms of gender are represented through different media and pop cultural mediums and the varying degrees to which individuals and communities have the power to shape, reform, and even transform those representations.
Topical Outline:
1. The cultural construction of gender
2. The intersectionality of gendered representations in media and pop culture
3. The ways social media, music, movies, television, and news media reveal, reflect, and shape societies’ views of gender
4. Media and pop culture as “pedagogical tools” through which we learn gender
5. Media and pop culture as both produced and consumed within the context of systems of power and domination
6. Media and pop culture as a space for the reinforcement of as well as challenges to social norms of gender
Learning Outcomes:
1. Demonstrate an awareness of the key topics, debates, critical vocabularies used in feminist media and pop culture studies
2. Consider how various forms of media and pop culture operate as political texts that influence and/or inform opinions about gender
3. Identify how intersections of race, class, and sexuality impact the ways that women and other gender outsiders are represented in media and popular culture and, as a result, in the broader social world
4. Analyze how media and popular culture socialize and discipline us within a context of power, even as they entertain us
5. Discuss the ways that media and popular culture reproduce social norms of gender, race sex, and class, at the same time they provide a common starting point from which diverse audiences can dialogue about key social and political issues
6. Describe the negative and positive ways that women and other gender outsiders have been represented in media and popular culture, including the development of stereotypes and the ways that people can resist them
Prerequisites:
Placement into
READ 0200 or
ESOL 0052 or completion of
READ 0100 or
ESOL 0042
MnTC: