Black Femininities & Masculinities in the US Media ONLINE

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. Concentrating on media texts that have influenced and ‘set the stage’ for today’s media, we will primarily examine media texts from the 1970s through the last decade of the 20th century. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information.