Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Focus on how media play a role in the representation, construction, and circulation of difference and identities by drawing from feminist theories, cultural studies and/or political economy to critique dominant conceptions. Topics may include how difference and identities intersect with: gaming, film, and technology. This course can be repeated once for credit (up to a maximum of two times).

COURSE DETAILS:

Topic for Spring 2025:  Technologies of Gender & Sexuality

Society has long organized itself around gender and gendered difference. However, in the last century, queer and feminist social movements have thrown the supposedly “natural” division if the sexes into question. Media—from newspapers and magazines to film and television to Instagram and TikTok—have played a central role in both constructing and deconstructing normative ideas of gender and sexuality. This course will provide students with an overview of how issues of race, gender, and sexuality manifest in media and technology. Students will be introduced to critical frameworks, including feminist theory, queer of color critique, and Black feminist thought, to interrogate how media and technology form and are formed by social understandings of gender and sexuality. Foregrounding intersectional analysis, this course will challenge students to think about questions like: What role do media play in constructing shifting notions of gender and sexuality? How do media and technology enable us to embody, police, and even hack gender and sexuality? How can we think of gender itself as a technology that we operate and perform in everyday life? Topics include: queer and feminist approaches to cultural and media studies; theories of performativity, the body, and subjectivity; post-, neoliberal, and popular feminisms; queer, trans, and feminist technologies; gender, sexuality, and surveillance; and raced and gendered labor in the media and technology industries.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Develop a theoretical foundation for understanding gender and sexuality as intrinsic to the introduction and social operation of media and technology;
• Consider queer, feminist, and critical race theories as radical epistemologies for understanding social constructions in media and technology; and
• Apply conceptual knowledge to analyze a media object that critiques or proposes ways of designing, thinking about, or using technology with an equitable, anti-patriarchal, liberatory framework in mind.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: