WFQS 267 - Topics in Gender, Media, Culture

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This topics course focuses on gender as it plays out in any number of forms of culture and media. Various texts help elucidate how gender is constructed, represented, and consumed, with important interventions derived from feminist theory, queer theory, media and cultural studies.

Topic for 2025/26a: AIDS Activist Media & New Queer Cinema. (Same as AFRS 267) AIDS activism and the feminist radicalism that it built on energized a vibrant film and video scene that broke from earlier, more conventional (sometimes maudlin) representations of queer lives. As critic B. Ruby Rich argued in a 1992 article (in which she coined the term “New Queer Cinema”), these works didn’t share “a single aesthetic vocabulary,” but they asserted a new style: intrepid, angry, cheeky, postmodern, and “full of pleasure.” From camcorder activism and the daring sex education graphics of AIDS activist media emerged a new generation of queer filmmakers of color, including Cheryl Dunye, Richard Fung, Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Wong Kar-Wai, and Yvonne Welbon. New Queer Cinema drew inspiration from the joy and erotics of defiance. Hiram Perez.

Topic for 2025/26a: Gender in Popular Media. (Same as MEDS 267) Through the analysis of a range of media including film, television, advertising, music and digital culture, along with the reading of a number of critical and theoretical texts, we interrogate the way that gender is constructed, represented and consumed in American popular media. An interdisciplinary combination of feminist theory, queer theory, media studies and cultural studies provide the tools for critical inquiry into the production and performance of gender and sexual identities and help us consider their various intersections with race, class, ethnicity and dis/ability. Students learn to meaningfully and critically engage with these popular forms to become discerning cultural consumers and creators. Anne Brancky.

Prerequisite(s): One prior course in WFQS or permission of the instructor.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS