Course Catalog

Explores what happens when dress and grooming become the basis for the modern phenomena of fashion. Studies the historical development of fashion: how fashion relates to the emergence of artistic, social, and economic forms and the ways fashion communicates ideas about status, gender, or culture. Investigates the role of media, advertising and marketing in the global fashion industry.

Will investigate the various ways in which gendered norms of identity are defined, constructed, enforced, managed and even adjudicated through the narratives that inform and produce our social and legal realties. Class readings will include works by Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, Michel Foucault, Angela Harris, Nivedita Menon, and Denise da Silva, among others.

This course introduces students to key concepts, theories and texts in the study of gender and media in a global context. By examining a range of media texts, modes of representation and production, we can analyse established patterns of how gender has come to be depicted and constructed by media, but also changes and challenges to these patterns. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of power, discourse and ideology in these contexts. Topics of study will include gender roles, body image, empowerment, spectatorship and performance, sexuality, stereotypes and exploitation; examples will be drawn from media forms including advertising, film, television, journalism and the internet. An overview of important feminist, poststructuralist and queer theories will be central to critical approaches to this material.

Considers a range of literary writing in which experimental prose and challenging depictions of sex have together defined a particularly subversive force. Reads these works against the development of particularly modern arieties of sexual identity and sexual behavior. Includes works by Genet, Nabokov, Orton, Bataille, Kathy Acker, Nella Larsen, among others.