Television, Gender, and Sexuality

Television, across all the screens on which we view, has an enormous impact on society—including on relations of gender and sexuality—just as it is impacted by those relations in turn. This course investigates how television produces and reproduces constructions of gender and sexuality through its institutional form (as it maps relations between public and private, domestic and social, familial and defamiliarized), narrative patterns (as it circulates family romances, links gender and genre, and mediates sexual and social tensions), and spectatorial relations (as it variously addresses viewers as sexed and gendered subjects, consumers and commodities, "mainstream" and marginalized).