This course explores the intersecting roles played by gender and sexuality in our media, focusing specifically on film, television, and digital culture. As we unpack media texts from Rudolph Valentino’s Son of the Sheik to HBO’s True Blood, we investigate the multiple ways in which popular media texts construct and communicate gender and sexuality. We will analyze how viewers engage with and make sense of representations of gender and sexuality and integrate them into their everyday lives, and we will consider how gender and sexuality inform our experience of online social networking, blogging and journaling, media fandom, and video game culture. For final projects, students can write media analyses, conduct historical or online research, or integrate class ideas into creative works.
By the conclusion of this course, you will be able to
- interrogate the role of gender and sexuality in cultural context
- debate theories of gender and sexuality in film, television, and new media studies
- incorporate theories of gender and sexuality into your own interpretations and analysis of media texts
- sustain critical thought regarding the role of gender and sexuality in media, in written form
- engage with all aspects of the writing process, from prewriting to drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading