Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture

Abstract

This course explores how popular culture generates and articulates our understandings of gender and sexuality and their intersections with race and class. The weekly themes cohere around two correlated topics: 1. “Celebrity” and its imbrications with 2. “Media Scandals, Controversies and Contentious Debates.” This syllabus reflects the premise that popular culture is never simply entertainment or a diversion for audiences. Instead, “pop” culture provides us with stories, images and scripts through which we imagine and practice femininities, masculinities, and sexualities. Popular culture provides us with models of how to understand our own racial, gender and sexual identities. This course allows us to critically analyze images, practices, and narratives that perpetuate and/or disrupt these norms. By the end of the course, you should have the skills and tools to perform such analyses on your own.