Bateman, Gender and Sexuality in Popular Culture (Revised Edition)

Course Description:
This course provides a survey of the field of cultural studies with an emphasis on how popular culture mediates, reinforces and undermines dominant understandings of

gender and sexuality. You will learn the inter-disciplinary toolbox of cultural studies (literary analysis, sociology, history and critical theories that include

Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer studies) and apply it to a range of media including print, television, film, music, and digital materials. We will focus

specifically on how popular media transmit ideas, meanings, and stereotypes to audiences who, in turn, re-work such messages to fit their individual and collective

needs. We will thus begin to understand popular culture as a site of personal and political struggle (as well as pleasure) in which interpretation plays a critical

role.

-Students will learn to think, talk and write critically about popular culture, including television, film, music, digital materials, and print advertisements.
-Students will better understand the role popular culture plays in constructing gender and sexual identities
-Students will master the basic critical vocabulary of cultural studies, particularly as it pertains to representations of sex, gender, and sexuality
-Students will understand that a text’s meaning extends beyond the text itself to include its producers, receivers, and cultural contexts
-Students will better understand gender and sexual diversity and its interaction with race, class, ethnicity, and belief
-Students will learn to interpret texts using an inter-disciplinary perspective
-Students will become familiar with medium-specific critical vocabularies

1.    If you don’t already have one, you must create a Twitter account. Each week you will tweet on some item of popular culture, e.g. a billboard, a music video, an

advertisement, a TV episode, a movie, etc. Your tweet must make an observation/argument that clearly connects to course material. Your tweet should be specific and

provocative. For example, “Tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad was particularly queer because it…” Each tweet should conclude with the hashtag #CSGSONLINE.
2.    After you tweet, you must develop your tweet into a 2-page double-spaced writing assignment. The writing assignment should repeat the tweet at the top of the

paper (including your Twitter name), but should then take a standard paragraph format in developing the tweet’s observation. The writing assignment must show clear use

of course material, including references to my lectures and citations from the book (with page numbers). More details about these writing assignments come at the end

of this syllabus. The writing assignments should be combined into one Word for PDF file and uploaded to Moodle by Friday, December 6th at 11:55PM.
3.    Campus involvement means attending 3 events, talks, performances, or exhibitions on campus and writing one-page commentaries that use course material to think

about how these events activate questions or concerns about sex, gender, and sexuality. The Cross Cultural Centers host a ton of events each quarter, so consider

consulting their calendar. And pay particular attention to the events around this year’s One Campus One Book selection, The Laramie Project. These commentaries should

be combined into one Word File or PDF and uploaded to Moodle by Friday, December 6th at 11:55PM.

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