Course Description
Examination of popular culture, highlighting analyses of gendered representations as they intersect key cultural moments. Throughout the course, students will draw from relevant current events, feminist cultural studies scholarship, and personal experience to discuss social identity, production and consumption, regulation, and representation.
Athena Title
GENDER POP CULTURE
Prerequisite
WMST 1110 or WMST 2010
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will become acquainted with concepts and theories of social identity and culture, seminal feminist cultural criticism, and interpretative approaches to better understand diverse practices and perspectives in contemporary popular culture. This course will provide an overall examination of popular culture, highlighting multiperspectival analyses of gendered representations as they intersect key moments on the Circuit of Culture. Throughout the course, students will draw from relevant current events, feminist cultural studies scholarship, and personal experience to discuss social identity, production and consumption, regulation, and representation in popular culture. This course is multidisciplinary in its approach to reading and signifying practices and symbolic systems in popular culture, which includes transnational media as well as folk culture and everyday life. Students will explore popular culture (through discussion, writing, and oral presentations) as product and process. Media (both electronic and print) will be woven throughout the course. In-class videos should be regarded as integral to the course because they elucidate concepts addressed in required course material and they enhance group discussion. At the close of this course, students will be able to: Understand theories and concepts of gender and popular culture Apply theoretical frameworks and interpretive approaches to analyze cultural texts Contextualize cultural products and processes through the Circuit of Culture Write a cogent, concise scholarly research paper about a cultural text
Topical Outline
1. The Circuit of Culture 2. Reading Popular Feminisms 3. Raunch and Raunch Culture 4. Music 5. Place and Space 6. Masculinities 7. Multiculturalism and the Global Popular