2020-21 Academic Catalog

This capstone seminar reads representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in popular culture through the lenses of feminist, critical race, queer, and trans theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe an approach to oppression that considered how structures of power act multiply on individuals based upon their interlocking racial, class, gender, sexual, and other identities. This seminar takes up the charge of intersectional analysis—rejecting essentialist theories of difference while exploring pluralities—to interpret diversity (or lack thereof) in forms of art and entertainment, focusing on film, TV, and digital media.

This course focuses on transnational feminist activism in an era of globalization, militarism and religious fundamentalism. We will learn about the debates around different theories of social change, the challenges and pitfalls of global sisterhood and the various "pedagogies of crossing" borders. We will explore case studies of how feminists have collaborated, built networks, mobilized resources and coalitions for collective action, in addition to the obstacles and constraints they have encountered and surmounted in their search for gender and sexual justice.