This course helps students gain critical literacy skills that will make them more effective and inclusive readers and thinkers. We will watch film and television shows that challenge the damsel in distress stereotype by featuring kick-ass women who can save themselves and/or others using violence. We will read what scholarly and popular critics argue about these film and television shows to unpack controversies related to the “strong, independent woman” ideal. Students will learn relevant media literacy vocabulary, analyze scenes from what we watch together, and gain historical knowledge of how representation of women has changed over the last century. They will apply this knowledge to journal assignments, reading responses, personal reflections, and multi-media assignments including a poster presentation. Please note: the film and television programs we watch are for mature audiences and include graphic violence and sexual themes.
Upon successful completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate the following knowledge or skills:
- Identify and account for personal biases that affect the way they watch movies and TV.
- Explain how the audience is both a receiver of and contributor to social and cultural stereotypes and how critical thinking skills can give audiences more control over how they are impacted by media and over changing media.
- Argue for why representation matters and why inclusive media is central to a just society.
- Identify and practice analysis techniques that support media literacy.
- Gain confidence in engaging with complex ideas by reading scholarly texts and applying those ideas to what they watch.
- Recognize and understand sexism, androcentrism, and heteronormativity and the role they play in undermining representations of women’s strength and independence.
- Recognize racism and ableism and the way they intersect with gender, sex, and sexual orientation to privilege certain groups.
IO1 Communication: Students will be able to communicate clearly and effectively.
The content will focus on educating students on the current conflicts and struggles in popular media related to diversifying representations of women and those assigned female at birth (AFAB). In particular, students will look at representations of women who fight onscreen over the last 100 years to see how sex/gender, race, and sexual orientation reflect contemporary ideas about femininity and womanhood to determine their origins, implications, and personal meanings. We will connect these representations to women’s real-world access to and success in positions of power to understand how creative texts reflect and reinforce those positions. In other words, we will compare the representations of fictional characters with real women in the media to better understand sexism, androcentrism, heteronormativity, and racism and the role they play in undermining representations of women’s strength.
Throughout the quarter, students will engage with key issues, questions, and debates about standpoint theory, feminist interpretations of the media, the male gaze, the female gaze, and the role of power in controlling representation, as well as the way transgressive attempts to undermine current patriarchal power structures are often co-opted into the current structures. The goal is to encourage deeper understanding about the conflicting messages about femininity and female identity we see in the media and the way those shape contemporary understanding of modern womanhood. Some questions to explore:
- How have students been shaped as viewers?
- What assumptions about our own identities inform the way we watch film and television? How do unaddressed biases influence these assumptions, and where do they lead?
- Why does representation matter? Whose representation? Matter for what?
- What does it mean to be an engaged reader who is media literate and why is that important?
- What tools help us make sense of difficult texts that are written for a “scholarly” audience? How do these tools relate to making sense of visual texts?
- How do the arguments of scholars compare to the arguments presented in popular media like blogs, news sources, etc.? What does this help us understand about the role audience plays in conveying information?
- What is a norm? How does it come about? How do we challenge norms that aren’t inclusive? Why does inclusivity matter?
- What does it mean to be a strong, independent woman? Has this identity always been possible? If not, when did it emerge and why? And why do we care?
- What are sexism, androcentrism, and heteronormativity, and how do they impact our experiences as viewers, media creators, and thinkers?
- How are our experiences of gender, sex, and sexual orientation complicated by racial identity and one’s abilities? What is the importance of recognizing the way identities can intersect? And how do these relate to representations of status?
- What’s the difference between empowering and disempowering representations of gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, and ability in the media?
- What’s objectification and how does it occur? How does this relate to the idea of the male gaze? Where does this idea come from? Is there a related female gaze? How might or does it differ, and what does this help us understand about power divisions in society?
- Do representations of women’s violence provide a good lens through which to understand society’s assumptions about women? What are the benefits? The limits to using this kind of lens?
- What other representations of strength and independence show women kicking-ass without violence? How do those differ?
Grades will be established through consideration of written assignments, presentations, multi-media projects, and participation.
PO4 should be assessed: Students will be able to recognize or articulate personal/interpersonal aspects of, or connections between, diverse cultural, social, or political contexts.
PO5 should be assessed: Students will be able to solve problems by gathering, interpreting, combining and/or applying information from multiple sources.