This class will engage cultural studies as one way to study culture as a process of meaning making through which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. This class will proceed from foundational readings in social theory and cultural studies to engage more specific readings about the intersection of race with gender and sexuality in the context of 20C America. Using critical and cultural texts we will trace some ways that culture is a site of struggle over the signifying practices we use to represent ourselves and others, with a focus on some of the ways that constantly contested social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality intersect to define the bodies and practices of ourselves and others.

The stereotype will be a conceptual path through which we will explore the way social categories define social figures. We will explore how stereotypes are structures of knowledge that become embedded into social formations as the salient way of knowing and determining the actions, attitudes, and behaviors of the figures they represent. This class will also unpack the role of cultural texts (including popular culture, literature, film, and visual culture) in negotiating, reinforcing, and challenging how the cultural representations we call stereotypes define us, as we also think about how stereotypes mold our very reading process.

We will read each critical text not only to understand and apply their key concepts but also rhetorically to understand how their claims are built and intertextually to find conceptual commonalities between texts and to build critical lenses to apply to our reading of cultural texts. To accomplish these reading goals, this class will rely heavily on reading and on participation in whole class and small group discussions of the critical and cultural texts we read. This class will require voracious intellectual curiosity and eager engagement with new ways of thinking about race, gender, and sexuality we will encounter. Coursework may include presentations, weekly reading quizzes/short comprehension writings, and longer writing assignments in which you apply the ideas of or critical texts to readings of cultural texts (or vice versa). Readings may include: cultural studies/criticism by Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Foucault, Adorno, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Lisa Lowe, Hortense Spillers, Judith Butler, Kobena Mercer, Evelyn Hammonds, Gloria Anzaldua, Roderick Ferguson, and José Muñoz. Cultural texts may include James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, poetry by Paul Beatty and Gwendolyn Brooks, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and the artwork of Coco Fusco/ Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Roger Shimomura, and Kara Keeling and more.

Book list
• Baldwin, James. Another Country. 1960. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1993.
ISBN 0679744711
• Course Packet