Teaching
Technologies of Gender and Sexuality
Society has long organized itself around gender and gendered difference. However, in the last century, queer and feminist social movements have thrown the supposedly “natural” division if the sexes into question. Media and technology—including film and television, cybertechnologies, and social media—have played a central role in both constructing and deconstructing normative ideas of gender and sexuality.
This course will provide students with critical theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches to the study of media, culture, and technology, including queer and feminist theory, Black feminist thought and intersectionality, and queer of colour critique. Students will then apply these concepts to examine specific case studies such as algorithmic oppression and the ethics of generative AI, sexual racism on dating apps, and the rise of the manosphere.
This course will challenge students to think about questions like: What role do media play in constructing shifting notions of gender and sexuality? How do media and technology enable us to embody, police, and even hack gender and sexuality? And how can we think of gender itself as a technology that we operate and perform in everyday life?
Weekly Schedule
UNIT I: THEORIES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Week 1: The Social Construction of Gender
Lorber, “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender”
Gleeson, “Judith Butler: ‘We Need to Rethink the Category of Woman’”
Big Think, “Berkeley Professor Explains Gender Theory”
Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions”
Connell, “The Social Organization of Masculinity”
Week 2: Race and Intersectionality
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”
TED, “The Urgency of Intersectionality”
Shange, excerpts from for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf
Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”
Collins, “Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought”
Tongues Untied (1989)
Week 3: Post-, Neoliberal, and Popular Feminisms
Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility”
Bellafante, “Feminism: It’s All About Me!”
Harris, “The ‘Can-Do’ Girl vs. the ‘At-Risk’ Girl”
Banet-Weiser, introduction to Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny
Week 4: Objectification and the Gaze
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Jackson, “The Invention of the ‘Male Gaze’”
hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”
Fredrickson & Roberts, “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks”
Banet-Weiser: “Media, Markets, Gender: Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment”
Ways of Seeing, episode 2 (1972)
Week 5: The Cyborg Body
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”
Chun, “Race and/as Technology: or, How to Do Things with Race”
Keeling, “Queer OS”
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
UNIT II: TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY
Week 6: Algorithmic Oppression and AI
Noble, “The Power of Algorithms”
Gebru, “Race and Gender”
Buolamwini & Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification”
Scheuerman et al., “Auto-Essentialization: Gender in Automated Facial Analysis as Extended Colonial Project”
Coded Bias (2020)
Week 7: The Beauty Imperative
McMillan Cottom, “In the Name of Beauty”
Kwan & Trautner, “Beauty Work: Individual and Institutional Rewards, the Reproduction of Gender, and Questions of Agency”
Kimoto, “tRacing Face: A Racial Genealogy of Beauty”
Week 8: Incels, Gamergate, and the Manosphere
Massanari, “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures”
Press-Reynolds, “Hasan Piker Thinks America Might Be Cooked”
Banet-Weiser, “Competence: Girls Who Code and Boys Who Hate Them”
Jane, “‘Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut’: Understanding E-bile”
Week 9: Riot Grrrl and Girl Zines
Piepmeier, introduction to Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism
Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival”
Radway, “Girl Zines Networks, Underground Itineraries, and Riot Grrrl History: Making Sense of the Struggle for New Social Forms in the 1990s and Beyond”
Selected zines and songs
Week 10: Dating Apps and Sexual Racism
Williams, “Automating Sexual Racism”
Shimizu, “The Hypersexuality of Asian/American Women: Toward a Politically Productive Perversity on Screen and Stage”
Mowlabocus, “A Kindr Grindr: Moderating Race(ism) in Techno-Spaces of Desire”
Week 11: Speculation and Imagination
Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
Thom, excerpts from Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
Benjamin, “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods”
Nelson, “Future Texts”
Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2017)
Dirty Computer (2018)