Introduction to Visual Culture

1 credits · Undergraduate

Survey of visual culture, from issues of production, circulation and reception to how visual media have historically exerted power, elicited desire, and constructed social experience. Topics include: how photography, television, film, video, Internet, advertising, comics, and other imagery code vision and inscribe race, gender, sexuality and class differences, and dominate nature and animals; how the gaze links cultural performativity, from the coliseum to shopping malls and museums to sports events; and how the rhetoric and semiotics of representation provide access to ways in which visual meaning is socially, politically, and culturally produced and obtained. (Team-taught.)