This course analyzes the historical, economic, legal, political, and social implication of the relationship between women, minorities, and the mass media. It focuses specifically on understanding the relationship between media representation and media/consumer culture and literacy, identity, television, film, advertising, the Internet, video games, newspapers/magazines, and music.
Week #1: Introduction to the Course and Understanding cultural approaches to media literacy/criticism
Week #2: Marketing a Consumer Culture
Week #3: Media and Identity
Questions to consider:
1. To what extent are notions of race, class, and gender relational concepts?
2. What are your theories about how we develop awareness of ourselves in relation to notions of gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, disability, and class?
3. What are the implications of a media with little diversity in its representations?
4. How might theories about media representation regarding gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, disability, and class relate to one another or perhaps have in common?
5. What does the notion of polyvalence mean in relation to ideas how media helps construct our identities?
Week #4: Understanding Genre
Questions to Consider:
1. What's the relationship between generic constraints and representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and class?
2. What might account for the (re)emergence of particular film genres during specific time periods?
3. How do generic constraints confine our reading of films and/or invite particular readings?
4. What purposes do generic conventions serve?
5. Are there ideological assumptions or values embedded in genres?
6. What pleasures do we associate with specific genres?
Week #5: Television by Day
Questions to Consider:
1. How do time and financial restraints impact the types and amount of diversity we see/don't see on television?
2. How are families commonly represented on television and how has that representation changed over the years?
3. To what extent/how are social problems addressed on television and who is most often blamed when they are?
4. Why are nighttime dramas perceived more positively than daytime dramas?
5. What are the impacts of reality television on culture and on television broadcasting norms?
6. Can television be gendered?
Week #6: Television by Night
Week #7: Film, Race, and Class
Questions to Consider:
1. What do films teach us about gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and class?
2. What do films teach us about who we are as "Americans"?
3. How do films reflect the cultural contexts in which they are produced and distributed?
4. How do films respond to/create conditions for social, political, and economic shifts?
Week #8: Film, Sex, and Sexual Orientation
Week #9: Music from 1950-1980
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the impacts of notions about gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and class on music? How/why have those impacts shifted over the years?
2. What musical genres have challenged the norms of music over the generations?
3. To what extent do certain musical genres promote negative representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and class? Do certain genres promote positive representations of these things?
4. Are performers such as Madonna and Lady Gaga feminists?
Week #10: Music from 1980-2000
Week #11: Music from 2000-present
Week #12: Newspapers and Magazines
Questions to Consider:
1. How might an editor influence the telling of stories?
2. How can network news programming and newspapers promote stereotypes?
3. What might the biases of news programs and newspapers affect what we "know" about political, social, and economic issues?
4. How do news programs and newspapers "tell" certain stories and what gets left out?
5. To what extent does the news media ignore larger social questions?
Week #13: Video Games
Questions to Consider:
1. Are there negative effects to constant gaming?
2. What representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and class are common in video games?
3. Do video games function in relation to our culture and the construction of our identities in the same way that other media forms do?
Week #14: Advertising
Questions to Consider:
1. What, if any, messages about gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, disability, and class dominate advertising?
2. What is the link between advertising, our identities, and the "good life"?
3. How have marketing strategies changed in recent years to reflect changing notions of gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, disability, and class?
4. What does advertising teach us about relationships?
5. How has advertising changed with the introduction of the Internet, mobile communication technologies, and other forms of new media?
Week #15: Culture Jamming
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the methods by which we can challenge the dominant representations in the media?
2. What purposes do co-optation and narrative manipulation of common media representations/narratives serve?
3. What is the role of the citizen in challenging dominant media representations? To what end?
