WMST7022 Media and Cultural Identities: Gender, Race and Sexuality

2020

4.5

1 x 1-hour tutorial weekly
1 x 1-hour seminar weekly

1 of WMST2014, WMST3015, WMST7015, WMST9025 has been successfully completed

Women's Studies (Honours), Graduate Diploma in Gender and Development, Master of Arts (Women’s Studies)

This interdisciplinary topic offers students at Honours level the opportunity to become familiar with contemporary critical analyses of popular culture. The focus is on the representation of gender, race and sexuality across a broad range of media forms including television, film, magazines, news media, computer gaming and advertising in all its varieties. The topic also addresses the ways in which audiences make use of and negotiate their identities through popular culture. It addresses some key debates about the politics of gender, race and sexuality in relation to popular culture. It adopts feminist and related critical approaches as its foundation.

This topic aims to:

• familiarise students with methods of media analysis commonly used by feminist scholars
• familiarise students with core critical theories of:
  (a) the representation of gender, race, sexuality and other related categories of social difference in a variety of forms of popular culture and
  (b) the ways that audiences engage with these popular culture representations

• develop advanced (Honours level) competency in analysing key debates in feminist and related media analysis
• develop a critical theoretical approach to Honours study
• develop advanced oral and written communication skills

Students successfully completing this topic should be able to:

• demonstrate a command of some key debates about the representation of gender, race and sexuality in popular culture
• demonstrate advanced competency in media analysis
• demonstrate advanced levels of written and oral communication, particularly in relation to analysis of media