RTF 386C: Race, Class, Gender and U.S. Television Cross-listed with AMS 391 and WGS 393 Fall 2020 - Online Meets Thursdays, 12:30-3pm (with an intermission midway) on Zoom Professor Mary Beltrán,
[email protected] Office hours: 9:30-10:30am Tuesdays and 1-3pm Wednesdays via Zoom. Appointments can be scheduled at https://calendly.com/mary-beltran; please email for other meeting times. Virtual Meeting Space: https://utexas.zoom.us/j/94596164570 Email:
[email protected] Course description: Television is one of the primary popular culture forums through which notions of race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality have been presented, validated, and challenged in the United States; this seminar explores the poetics and politics of this evolution. In addition to study of how racial and ethnic groups, and also of how gender, sexual orientation and class have been constructed in U.S. narrative television since its inception and how various groups have participated in the production of television texts throughout these decades, we will survey the seminal scholarship on these topics and areas of theoretical and popular contention. Key areas of focus will include the evolution of popular genres such as sitcoms, debates over equitable representation and over the possibilities for television to serve as a public forum for all, negotiations over self-representation and television authorship, feminist and anti-racist content, and televisual representation in the previous, so-called “post-“ era, and the current “peak TV” era. Although a variety of media studies approaches are taken up in the readings, critical and cultural studies scholarship will be emphasized.