124263 KO Critical Media Analysis (2018W)

This course will start with a consideration how poststructuralist theories define anti-essentialist notions of cultural identity against hierarchical essentialist concepts. Focussing on the thesis that cultural identities are continually organised and produced within vectors of similarity and difference, we will encounter theories of deconstruction which allow us to identify the (power-)political nature of identity-production.
We will investigate how notions of identity generated in a process of becoming in order to understand how cultural identity comes into being in shifting, multiple, unstable discursive positions (e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, class, political position, morality, religion etc).
Our main focus will be directed on concepts of identities as hybrid, queer and abject – each of these terms designates in-between, ambiguous states of marked by multiplicity, fluidity, and fragmentation which transgress the vectors of similarity and difference and thus disturb well-established concepts of identity, system, and (b)orders.
We will also ask how institutional settings categorise “aberrant” identities and bodies (e.g. regulate, remould, break identities)? Do they trigger a development of transgressive subjects who strive to disrupt and transcend normative parameters? What is the outcome?
Hybridity, queerness, and abjection are core terms in cultural theories developed by Bhabha, Butler, and Kristeva-
in this course we will:
On the one hand, discuss the original concepts, how they interrelate and differ, and how they were elaborated by other theorists in a variety of fields of cultural studies e.g. postcolonialism, feminist/gender – and queer studies, psychoanalytical theories, discourse theory, postmodern studies.
On the other hand, we will analyse numerous exciting examples from various media-contexts & cultural practices in order to see how hybrid, queer, and abject identities constitute themselves (subversively) in practice.