Sarah Baartman through Schitt's Creek: An Introduction to Gender and Popular Culture

*Taught Online*  Throughout the twentieth century, numerous theorists have argued that genders are learned, enacted, and ascribed identities, worked out through interaction. As such, the production of gender as category is carried out in relation to cultural models and artifacts people use to make sense of, model and reject gendered identities, characteristics, and roles. This undergraduate course takes popular culture, including film, television, literature, and social media, as a starting point for understanding the often taken-for granted characteristics deemed gendered in Western culture and elsewhere. Attending to race, class, sexuality, age, and other social categorizations throughout, we will marry gender and queer theory with works on representation, attending particularly to how ethnographic works have apprehended the role of media in producing, propagating, contesting, and distilling cultural notions of gender. While we will heavily examine widely-disseminated, economically-powerful imagery, we will also attend closely to alternative, resistant, and activist media, and to creative consumption or reparative reading. This class will meet online for nine synchronous sessions during the summer quarter.