WGS 220
Gender and Popular Culture

Learning Goals

Students in Gender and Popular Culture will:

  1. Examine the ways in which gender and sexual identities are created, recreated and circulated in popular culture.
  2. Explore primary texts of popular culture and interpret those texts through a gender lens. We will focus on diverse realms of popular culture with a particular focus on advertising, popular magazines, and film, with opportunities for students to pursue their own study of popular music, television, cyberspace, sports, and other media.   
  3. Study, debate and apply critical and theoretical texts on popular culture. We will look at interpretive and historical approaches to the "texts" of culture, as well as political economy approaches to the production of culture.
  4. Examine how the many forms of popular culture socialize and discipline us even as they entertain us. We will engage in a critical dialogue about how forms of popular culture work and how we can become critical consumers and producers of culture.  
  5. Examine the ways in which popular culture serves as an important site where gender intersects with other systems of privilege and oppression such as sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity.    
  6. Develop writing skills in a variety of discursive modes including summary, critical review, and text analysis.

These course goals correspond to the goals of the Gender requirement of the Liberal Learning Program. Specifically, the course is designed to contribute to the following goals:

•  Gain an understanding of gender as a central category of analysis that compels constant inquiry into the production and legitimation of knowledge

•  Analyze historical and contemporary systems of privilege and oppression, with special attention to the ways gender intersects with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and nationality

•  Gain a critical awareness of the instability of identity categories

•  Understand how all fields of knowledge are partial, situated, and have a political nature

•  Analyze how the media and other social institutions exert a shaping force on gender, and how, conversely, gender imperatives shape individuals, families, communities, and nations