3 credits
Spring 2026 Lecture Upper Division
In this course, students investigate the gendered and intersectional meanings ascribed to or generated by popular cinematic and other mass-distributed visual texts, with particular attention to the way that visual media have impacted women's participation in public culture over the last century and a half. This course is highly conceptual, asking students to learn to recognize power relations hiding within visual entertainments and embedded within the experience of everyday life, with the goal of deepening their understanding and appreciation of the experience of spectatorship and visuality as a central element of modern American and contemporary global mass culture.
Learning Outcomes1Appreciate the ideological work that entertainment and mass cultural texts such as popular films perform.
2Analyze popular visual texts including film and video for the meanings and power relations they invoke.
3Apply feminist and queer theorizing of gender, gender identity, and sexuality to visual texts.
4Assess the intersectional impact that popular film and cinema have had on women and sexual minorities.
5Understand the ways that American popular film, particularly those produced in Hollywood for mass distribution, has shared American culture and global relationships since the inception of cinema in the late 19th century.
made by Purdue students.