Gender, Identity, and Sexuality

3 credits

This course may be used to satisfy one of four electives required within the Communication major.This course offers an introduction to gender and sexuality studies, as a foundation to explore how the relationships between our personal biographies and the wider forces in society affect our lives and the lives of others. Employing an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, we utilize a variety of academic and popular cultural resources to analyze how gender, sexuality, and identity are learned, embodied, and re/negotiated in everyday life. Underscoring the influence of media on social norms, we investigate how our identities are dynamically shaped by individual, interactional, and institutional sociocultural domains. With emphasis given to intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, we consider how our positionalities are socially constructed, with consequential effects.