This course provides various analytic frameworks for understanding how popular culture functions as sites for producing, circulating, and contesting gender meanings. We will take a comparative approach to different kinds of contemporary US popular culture, including fashion, popular music, pulp fiction, web-based media, television, and films. In particular, we will consider how gender meaning in these different sites, for example, the wearing of traditional ethnic clothing such as cheongsam and saris, becomes possible only through histories of racialization, migration, military interventions, and class conflict. This course will consider the presence of Asian Americans in popular culture as well as the making of popular/sub-cultures by Asian Americans as focal points for understanding gender meanings. We will move between questions of representation (such as asking why Asian American women like Lucy Liu are 'dragon ladies') and materialist analyses of popular culture technologies (such as considering the labor that goes into the production of ethnic-influenced clothing as with Banana Republic's line of clothes celebrating the movie version of Memoirs of a Geisha). Throughout the semester, we will consider how people actively take up, refuse, or revise the meanings about racialized gender in popular culture. The final project moves us beyond analyzing popular culture to create a product that demonstrates how gender gets produced, circulated, and contested in popular culture in complex ways.
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