SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION

CMNS 486-4

SPECIAL TOPICS

GENDER AND MEDIA CULTURE

Prerequisite:

Permission of the instructor.


Course Description:

The purpose of this course is to trace the media’s construction of gender as it intersects with race, class and sexuality since the mid-20th century. A second directive of the course is to explore theoretical and cultural approaches to analyzing the construction of gender in a media culture. Drawing on contemporary debates in cultural studies a third theme of the course is the relationship of gender portrayals on the lived experience of men and women; addressing specifically how the issues of feminism and gender as constructed by media culture are negotiated within the context of their everyday lives. The goal of undertaking such an approach is to be able to make links between the theory and practice of media culture, and critique the possibility of resistance.
The course will explore the construction of gender in a wide range of cultural texts largely focusing on television, advertising and music, but also looking at Hollywood movies. The objectives of the course are two-fold. The first is to familiarize students with the key issues in media theory pertaining to gender, and the second is to examine various methodological and theoretical approaches to the critique of the media’s construction and representation of gender. As well the audience’s interaction with such representations will be examined. While these two objectives will form the critical foundation of the entire course, the course itself is organized around weekly themes that will trace both the constructions of gender in the Western media and the development of media and gender theory to deal with such constructions.


Course Texts:

Dines, Gail and Jean M. Humez (eds). Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader. (London: Sage Publications, 1995).
Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. (Manchester UP, 2000)


Course Requirements:

Take home mid-term exam 25%
Group Presentation 25%
Term Project Proposal 5%
Term Project 25%
Participation 20%


Course Overview


Week 1

Introduction: framing the issues.
Kellner, Douglas. “Cultural Studies, Multi-Culturalism and Media Culture” (chapter 1).
Hollows, Joanne. “Second-wave Feminism and Femininity” (chapter 1).

Week 2

Constructing the female audience
Goldman, Robert. “Constructing and Addressing the Audience as Commodity” (chapter 11).
Radway, Janice “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context” (chapter 24).
Rogers, Deborah. “Daze of Our Lives: The Soap Opera as Feminine Text” (chapter 37).

Week 3

The construction of new masculinities
Katz, Jason. “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity” (chapter 18 in Dines)
Dines, Gail. “I Buy it for the Articles: Playboy Magazine and the Sexualization of Consumerism” (chapter 29).
Kellner, Douglas. “Reading Images Critically” Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy” (chapter 17).

Week 4

Presentations of the family: Gender and class.
Lipsitz, George. “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class Ethnicity” (chapter 7).
Butsch, Richard. “Ralph, Fred, Archie and Homer: Why Television Keeps Recreating the White Male Working Class Buffoon” (chapter 47).

Week 5

Cultural Studies enters the gender debate: The possibilities of resistance.
Lee, Janet. “Subversive Sitcoms: Roseanne as Inspiration for Feminist Resistance” (chapter 53).
Hollows, Joanne. “Feminism,Cultural Studies and Popular Culture.” (chapter 19).
McRobbie, Angela. “New Times in Cultural Studies” Postmodernism and Popular Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994) 24-43.(on reserve).

Week 6

Pornography debates .
Dworkin, Andrea. “Pornography and male supremacy” (chapter 27).
Myers, Kathy. “Towards a Feminist Erotica” (chapter 30).
Jensen, Robert. “Pornography and the Limits of Experimental Research” (chapter 34).

Week 7

Issues of race and post colonial theory.
Bobo, Jacqueline. “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers” (chapter 8).
Rhodes, Jane. “ The Visibility of Race and Media History” (chapter 5).
Gray, Herman. “Television, Black Americana and the American Dream” (chapter 49).
Perry, Immani. “It’s My Thang and I’ll Swing It the Way That I Feel! Sexuality and the Black Women Rappers” (chapter 59).

Week 8

Madonna and the possibility of gender as performance.
hooks, bell. “Madonna: Plantation mistress or Soul Sister?” (chapter 4).
Brown, Jane D and Laurie Schulze. “The Effects of Race, Gender and Fandom on Audience Interpretation of Madonna’s Music Videos.” (chapter 57).
Osborne, Peter and Lynne Segal. Gender as Performance: an Interview with Judith Butler” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices Stuart Hall (ed.) (London: Sage 1997) 235-238. (on reserve)

Week 9

Queer feminist approaches
Gross, Larry. “Out of the mainstream: Sexual Minorities and Mass Media” (chapter 9)
Clark, Danae. “ Commodity Lesbianism” (chapter 19).

Week 10

The gendered consumer
Hollows, Joanne. Consumption and material Culture” (chapter 6)
Douglas, Susan. “Narcissism as Liberation” in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, Jennifer Scanlon (ed). (NY: New York UP, 2000) 267-282. (on reserve)
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Listening to Khakis” in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, Jennifer Scanlon (ed). (NY: New York UP, 2000) 179- 190). (on reserve)

Week 11

Postfeminism: The Spice Girls and Grrrl Revolutions
Hollows, Joanne. “Feminism in Popular Culture” (chapter 9).
Driscoll, Catherine. “Girls culture, revenge and global capitalism: Cybergirls , Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls.” Australian Feminist Studies. Apr. vol. 12, issue 29, 1999. 173-195. (on reserve)
Wald, Gayle: “Just a girl: Rock Music, Feminism and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth.” Signs. vol. 23, no. 3. 1998. 576-609. (on reserve)

Week 12

It’s a matter of Britney, Sex in the City and Bridget Jones, but also Ricky Martin, the Back Street Boys and Russell Crowe. Where are we now?
Readings: TBA.

The School expects that the grades awarded in this course will bear some reasonable relation to established university-wide practices with respect to both levels and distribution of grades. In addition, the School will follow Policy T10.02 with respect to “Intellectual Honesty” and “Academic Discipline” (see the current Calendar, General Regulations section).