124261 AR Cultural/Media Studies 1/2 (AR) (2011W)

The course will centrally consider that a large amount of cultural theory has been produced in the last decades which has taken gender and/or race as
the central conceptual categories in the description of culture by focussing on cultural "identity" and "difference" as fundamentally interwined with
notions of gender and race. As M. Wittig argues: "Race, exactly like sex, was taken as an 'immediate given', a 'sensible given', 'physical features' belonging
to a natural order' - not only poststructuralist theories of the naturalisation racialised, sexed, gendered "Other" will be our central concern,
but we will also consider how diverse theories from fields of semiotic, discursive, psychoanalytical cultural analysis can practically be applied
to examples from literature, art, film, consumerist and media fields (- to be announced).
As regards the cultural signification of the Gendered and Sexed Other we will trace how this is established in historical and contemporary contexts as we
focus on cultural codings of femininity, masculinity, the body, queer theory as regards compulsory heterosexuality and performative transgressive sexual identity
Beauvoir, Irigaray, Butler, Lauretis, Bronfen, Mulvey, bell hooks.
As regards the cultural signification of the Racial Other:we will analyse the historical/imperialistic/colonial cultural representations and the diverse and complex
shifts in post-colonial representational practices in the 20th and 21st centuries of: Black representation, Orientalism, constructions of Indian identity.
Central focus will be on perspectives of diverse cultural and postcolonial theories of St. Hall, E.Said, J. MacKenzie, G.Spivak, H.Bhabha; S.Rushdie.
In the course parallels and differences in representations and signifying practices of race, gender & sex as "the Other" will be of central concern.
Reading-list and films we will discuss will soon be announced.