Twentieth-Century Studies
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
The histories of women’s lives are always already mediated — perhaps this became clearest once culture had entered what Walter Benjamin called the era of mechanical reproduction, that is, the era when media was massified once and for all. In response, this course reads through a range of 20th century women’s mediated self-representations, that is, texts which are particularly aware of media’s normalizing and governing force, as well as of its limits and vulnerability to reform or deformance. We will see how these writers negotiate with celebrity, spectacularity, sexualization, racialization, spectrality, infantilization, and other ideations of an anxious hegemony. We will back up our readings with theorizations from feminist scholars of media and new media such as the Women’s Studies Group of the CCCS, Haraway, Raley, and other recent scholars involved with women’s online lives in gaming and other virtual worlds.Midterm in-class essay, final exam, final project.
More info at blogs.ubc.ca/jpaltin.
