7AAYCC26 Gender, Media and Culture
Taught by Dr Christina Scharff
Do women journalists make a difference to the news that is being produced? Are we currently experiencing a sexualisation of culture? And how has the concept of ‘culture’ been mobilised since 9/11? This course aims at developing students’ understanding of gender, media and culture in the 21st century. Students will acquire the theoretical tools to study gender in the media, and across a range of contemporary cultural phenomena. The course explores the gendered dimensions of current cultural trends – for example neoliberalism and individualization - and is attentive to the ways gender intersects with other axes of power, such as race, class, and sexuality. The course will be divided into four parts: The first part introduces the course and provides students with an understanding of different theoretical approaches to the study of gender. The second part focuses on gender and the media while part three explores gender and culture. The last part consists of two case studies that cut across the media and cultural sphere, and that allow students to apply the different theoretical perspectives encountered on the course. The course will allow students to develop their skills in providing theoretically informed analyses of gender in the media, and culture.
Part I:
Week 1: Introduction to the course, key concepts and issues
Week 2: What is Gender?
Part II:
Week 3: Analyzing gender in media texts
Week 4: Postfeminist media culture
Week 5: Women in the news room: transforming gender relations?
Part III:
Week 6: Ideal neoliberal subjects? Neoliberalism, individualization and femininities
Week 7: The package picture of cultures
Week 8: Affect: the cultural politics of emotions
Part IV:
Week 9: The sexualisation of culture?
Week 10: The new feminisms
Key Reading
Aapola, S., Gonick, M. and Harris, A. (2005) Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, Macmillan).
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. (New York: Routledge).
Alexander, C. (1996) The art of being Black: the creation of Black British youth identities (Oxford: OUP).
Butler (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, New York: Routledge).
Brown, W. (2006) Regulating aversion: tolerance in the age of identity and empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).
Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002) Young Masculinities: Understanding boys in contemporary society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Gill, R. (2007) Gender and the media. (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press).
Hirschkind, C. and Mahmood, S. (2002) 'Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency'. Anthropological Quarterly 75(2): 339 - 354.
McRobbie, A. (2009) The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change (London: Sage).
Assessment
1 x 4000 word essay