Women in American Media Culture

3 units

In this class we will critically examine and evaluate the cultural construction and representation of women, femininity, and feminism in contemporary American mass media and trace their development throughout the 20th century. We will focus on a variety of mass-produced commercial media texts, surveying radio, television, magazines, advertising, and popular music. Although gender is the primary identity construction examined in this course, we will also pay close attention to other aspects of identity defining American women, such as ethnicity, class, and sexuality. We will investigate representational issues in relation to their political repercussions, and draw from a broad range of academic literature, including feminist television criticism, film theory, cultural studies, communication theory, and popular music criticism. Students will be responsible for weekly response papers and two critical essays.