Race, Gender, and Popular Culture

Spring 2017 ETHNC 3910-001 Race, Gender, and Popular Culture M/W 8:05-9:25 Bu C 212 Dr. Elizabeth Archuleta

The course is based on the premise that popular culture is never simply diversion or entertainment. Instead, it demonstrates how popular culture provides us with stories, images, and scripts that facilitate in imagining and practicing race and gender, how we conceive of race and gender, and how we exchange knowledge about race and gender.

Specifically, this course takes as a foundational assumption that we still live in a society where, while there may be some improvement, racism, sexism, and homophobia are alive and well. As such, the popular culture produced and consumed in the U.S. plays a part in those systems of oppression and domination, and it can also be used as a powerful political tool to challenge those systems. In this course, we will take recent trends in pop culture seriously in order to tease out the messages contained within them, especially in relation to race and gender. How does popular culture reinforce and/or challenge race and gender norms? What messages do we receive from popular culture about the “correct” ways to be in the U.S.? For whom are these “correct” lives attainable? Who is left out? In other words, what do popular culture representations say about the lived realities of race and gender in the U.S.? How does pop culture discipline and/or offer new possibilities for our lives?

We will briefly explore the theory relevant to a current analysis of popular culture, but the majority of our time will be spent thinking together about contemporary popular culture and the messages that popular culture’s artifacts contain. In addition to academic material, many sources will be contemporary news and blog posts on recent pop culture trends in order to analyze culture as it’s happening. Overall, the goal of the class will be to cultivate the skills necessary to analyze the popular culture we consume every day in our lives, to critically engage popular culture, and to recognize the ways we both consent and are coerced into upholding a certain social order through popular culture (and to have fun). Additionally, rather than being simply consumers of popular culture, students will become creators of a popular culture artifact with the creation of a zine.

REQUIRED TEXTS/MATERIALS All materials are located on Canvas, through Marriott Library streaming services, or online.