Leader: JaneMaree Maher

Offered

Not offered in 2008

Synopsis

This unit introduces the growing field of feminist cultural studies by exploring how questions of sex and gender relate to the fields of media and consumption. The unit develops a critical approach to femininity and masculinity and examines popular culture and its consumption, enabling students 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 Gender, 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.

Assessment

In Class Test (1000 words): 20%
Research Skills Exercise (1000 words): 20%
Research Project (2500 words): 60%

Contact hours

2 hours (1 x 2 hour seminar) per week

Prerequisites

A first-year sequence

Prohibitions

GND2030