Topics in Gender and American Culture

WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES 330S

This course will focus on the relationship of race, gender and sexuality in the context of the cultural and political transformations of the two postwar periods, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Sexual Revolution, the "war on drugs" and the Obama era. The primary focus will be to consider how gender and sexuality inform cultural imaginings and representations of African American experience since WWII. Emphasizing close reading of canonical literature paired with critical representations of blackness in film, visual art and television we will examine how African American artists employed aesthetic expression for cultural critique of American racism and how fiction served as an arena for advancing a critique of racist injustice and for raising fundamental questions about the concept of race itself. Course content will be guided by the following questions: Why are gender and sexuality important to consider when reading African American cultural texts? How do discourses of gender and sexuality affect the meaning of blackness? How does gender impact racial representation and its political meanings? Finally, what are the cultural impacts of these gendered sexualized and politicized racial representations?
Course Attributes: BU BA; AS HUM; AS SD I; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

Section 01

Topics in Gender and American Culture - 01
INSTRUCTOR: Manditch-Prottas