Teenage girls as audience: Media and popular culture's role in the identity construction of teenage girls
Dr. Sigal Barak-Brandes

The course will focus on the attributes of the young feminine audience. We will start with an understanding of the connection between media, popular culture and identity construction (including gender identity).
We will continue into the images and different ways of representing girls in the media and popular culture, while acknowledging the identification of girls as consumers in a Capitalist society. The course will introduce the students with theoretical and methodological changes regarding media audience in general, while focusing on the contribution of the feminist scholarship to the field of gendered audiences in particular.
We will analyze the development of Girls' studies and their contribution to the knowledge about that audience and it's cultural pleasures. The course will also provide a discussion about the unique place of girls as both cultural consumers and producers in the Twenty-first century.
The course is based on reading theoretical and empirical texts, and analyzing examples from different media texts.
The students works should be researching interpretation patterns used by Israeli girls regarding different media contents and images, or alternatively, the works will try to analyze the texts which Israeli girls produced by themselves.