Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 291P - S- Gender & Pop Culture

This course examines popular culture - including television, film, music, music videos, sports, and social media - from a feminist perspective. We will watch and read a range of popular media and look at popular culture as a site of political and social ideology, interrogating how popular culture works to normalize and perpetuate oppression. Course content will address the question of how film and television produce meaning around race, gender, and other identities and what popular culture says about society. Course content will include the changing of LGBT depictions throughout recent history, the impact of the Hayes code, and the continues representational violence that occurs through the trope of "bury your gays" which continues to be an issue in film and television. We will watch films, such as Shrek, to explore satire and its limit and will watch television shows, such as Killing Eve and Black Mirror, to look at how they utilize generic conventions to disrupt normative meanings around gender, violence, and technology. We will also take a deep dive into social media and its effects on current politics and our own experiences with social media usage. This will be examined within the broader context of propaganda, the rise of authoritarianism, and distorted representations of fascism in popular media. We will also examine the relationship of media and pop culture to social justice and the potential for different types of media to disrupt norms, such as hip-hop culture, short stories that resist normative structures, and various films/TV shows.