Gender and Material Culture

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This interdisciplinary Seminar will use the lens of material culture to explore the intersections between gender, race, class. Material culture--the study of things and their meanings--offers a wide ranging and interdisciplinary set of methods for analyzing how objects become gendered, and in turn, how objects construct gender. The emphasis will be on objects used in North America (eg. the pink pussy hat of 2016), and the sources and methodologies will include surviving objects, archives, printed matter, and visual sources. Students will work on research papers that will allow them to explore objects and themes of particular relevance to their own research interests and fields of study.