07 Jul MEDIA ANALYSIS
ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION:
Choose a piece of media (music video, film, tv show, news, podcast, a scene, etc.). It should be one of your own choosing. Explain the political significance of it, whether it is the plot, casting, message, ending, or its representation of history, etc.
Since it is a short essay, be mindful of picking an aspect you can talk in detail about. Some questions to think about: What kind of politics does it perform? What narrative or counter-narrative is it making? What are the politics of its reception? What kinds of histories does it excavate or disavow? What ideologies are at play and for what purpose? Who benefits? Who is it for and why? What are some structural and institutional issues that are contributing to disparities in the quality of life of the subjects? And what categories of social difference are remade through the ideologies, structures, and institutions addressed in this piece of media?
See Tinsleys Beyonc in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism. THIS IS HELPFUL FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT. PLEASE READ IT BEFORE WRITING.
Please cite only the media you choose and the two reading articles I provided.
Information to help you understand the content of this course and the topics of the week This helps your essay relate to this course)
Course Description:
This course explores the centrality of mass media such as television, film, and the internet, in the formation of multiple identities and the role of media as focal points for various cultural and political contestations. Course materials will be drawn from visual studies, aesthetic theory, Black, Indigenous, and Asian feminisms, queer and trans theory, and decolonial studies. This course considers how social differences such as gender, race, sexuality, and class, among others, are elaborated in the media as normative categories for governance. It explores how various forms of media can both perpetuate some of our most common, violent sensibilities and express complex emancipatory struggles that speak to trauma, healing, and other worldly possibilities. Selected topics in our 12 week long engagement with various political conversations about media include love, sex, racial capitalism, queer and trans critiques of performance, Black activism, intersectionality, Asian geopolitics, and the politics of representation and inclusion.
Guiding Question of this week:
How are racial-sexual violence and capitalism bound to the ways in which we represent sexuality for (queer and trans) women of color (and perhaps, how we/they wrestle with the politics of our/their sexuality in a white supremacist, patriarchal world)? How do historic and personal traumas complicate sex and pleasure, and how does the performance of sexuality by women of color also an opportunity to work out those politics?
