WMN3030 - Women, Media and Consumption: Feminist Cultural Studies

Leader: JaneMaree Maher

Offered

Clayton First semester 2007 (Day)

Synopsis

This unit introduces the growing field of feminist cultural studies by exploring how questions of women and gender relate to the fields of media and consumption. The unit examines popular culture and its consumption, enabling studens to explore a number of approaches to the field including: critiques of mass cultural production, advertising and marketing analyses of how cultural meanings are made (including audience response approaches): media content analysis; and feminist (and other) approaches to popular sub-cultures.

Objectives

By the successful completion of Women, Media and Consumption, students should have acquired the following skills:

1. A grounded working knowledge of the major theoretical and methodological approaches that constitute the field of cultural studies and feminist cultural studies.
2. An informed theoretical critique of how gender is constituted in popular culture.
3. An interdisciplinary approach to textual analysis.
4. Library based research skills and a working knowledge of the major data-bases used in cultural studies.
5. The ability to think critical and analytically, and to be able to articulate those thought processes in a high standard of written and oral expression.
6. A focus upon the production of scholarly research as the end point of a process of reading, discussion, drafting and debate.
7. The production of thoroughly researched, well documented and presented formal essays.
8. The ability to work both independently as scholars and to participate actively in group projects.

Third-year students will be expected to demonstrate greater capacity for independent research and will be required to answer a class test of a more conceptually challenging nature.

Assessment

Bibliographic/research skills exercise (1000 words): 20%
Essay (2500 words): 50%
Class test (1 hour, 1000 words equivalent): 20%
Class participation: 10%
Third-year students will be expected to demonstrate greater capacity for independent research and will be required to answer class test questions of a more conceptually challenging nature.

Contact hours

2 hours (1 x 2 hour seminar) per week

Prerequisites

A first-year sequence

Prohibitions

WMN2030