This course provides basic terminology and techniques for understanding the interconnections between cultural analysis and feminist research. The course is intended to provide the student of gender studies with tools to analyze culture from a feminist perspective. We shall inquire how cultural texts produce and represent different interpretations to gender relations and to what extent they reproduce and challenge them.

We will address attendant issues, such as the constitution of subjectivity, cultural consumption, collective identities, symbolic interactions along the reproduction and diversion from social boundaries. The course will also combine discussions of how cultural texts such as (TV sitcoms, popular press, films, blogs, internet forums and advertisements) constitute normative perceptions of autonomy, authenticity, happiness and well-being. We will also discuss theoretical texts analyzing various aspects of femininity and masculinity, post feminism, class, race, time, age, social emotions, hetronormativity and the heterosexual imagination.

Requirements: Final Exam.