MA Gender, Media & Culture

The module introduces key debates and developments in feminist theory, cultural theory and in particular feminist cultural theory. It introduces both early debates which defined these fields and contemporary developments and departures. This core module does not attempt to map the whole field of gender scholarship chronologically, nor can it be exhaustive, but instead it extrapolates a number of themes around which some of the most influential and defining work has emerged.

More specifically, students will be introduced to social constructivist and post-structuralist perspectives, also to debates on feminism, ethnicity and the critique of universalism; to key questions in relation to feminism, biology and reproductionon; the emergence of postcolonial feminism, debates on gender, space and nation and post-feminist culture.

The module provides an exploration of recent themes in feminist and cultural theory. It also allows you to explore a series of case study topics within the broad fields of gender cultural studies. You will become aware of the range of theoretical resources mobilised by feminist writers to account for, or make sense of, how bodies take shape over time. You will become familiar with the feminist approaches to questions of affect and emotion.

Within the humanities, sciences, and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from contagions, which spread virally on social media seen to work through embodied forms of sense-making and perception, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities; the modulation of emotion, affect and feeling, and the creation of mediated intimacy across a range of media forms; through to a range of practices which target the body as the site of change, expression and transformation. The body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding media and communications. This option will explore these debates by encouraging the student to think through their own embodied experience in relation to a number of case studies. These will include media representations and eating disorders; body image; queer and transgendered bodies; social media contagions, non-verbal and subliminal communication; affect and emotion; film and the senses (including suggestion); narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation; and mental health and the media (particularly exploring mental health and difference in the context of diasporic media).

The module draws from a wide range of debates and theories across the field of body studies, including affect studies, queer theory, feminisms, cultural studies, media studies and sociology. It will provide students with some timely and novel ways of thinking about the place of experience within contemporary governance and communication processes.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout

A student-centred collaborative learning environment in involved with The Centre for Feminist Research and the Methods Lab will deliver an interactive method of learning and exchange led by specialists in the field to understand as well as enact feminist research methods. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach this module emphasises multi-methods. Taught by feminist researchers sessions consist of lectures, field visits, small group work and peer feedback sessions. Ethnography, new maps, walks, film, experiments, interviews, audio, documents, narrative, architectural encounters and exhibitions will all feature across the period of exchange. A series of case studies, from specialists in the field, will offer students the opportunity to explore the developments of feminist methods, within an inter-disciplinary critical and practice-based approach.

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Course convenor: Rebecca Coleman