120691 PS Proseminar Cultural and Media Studies (2016W)

CS concentrates especially on issues of cultural "identity" and "difference" and these categories are seen as fundamentally intertwined with notions of gender, sex and race. Race, exactly like sex, was taken as an 'immediate given', 'physical features' belonging to a natural order. (Wittig) Gender, sex and race are so central to the study of culture that most of the theoretical traditions have something to say about them: there is a common emphasis on the cultural constructions of gender, sex and race as marked categories signifying a naturalized Other.
Focusing on an in-depth analysis of poststructuralist deconstructive theories we will see that these are interrelated but must not be interchangeably used / applied. A discussion of diverse approaches to cultural exclusionary practices will show how these approaches can be used as exciting tools to unlock such power-discourses in practical examples from film, literature, media,etc.
The course will operate within a structure of three levels of investigation:
(1) Cultural significations of the gendered and sexed Other: we will analyze cultural codings of femininity, masculinity, and the body in context of theories on compulsory heterosexuality, performativity, and performance of transgressive sexual identities which disrupt patriarchal hegemony. (e.g. Beauvoir, Foucault, Butler, Kristeva).
(2) Cultural significations of the Racial Other: we will consider historical imperialistic/colonial cultural representations and the complex shifts in postcolonial representational practices in the late 20th and 21st centuries. In focus are representations of the Primitive/Uncultured; representations of Black/s (Fanon, Hall, Mercer); constructions of Oriental identity (Said, Bhabha) and subaltern-studies.
(3) Finally, we will examine cultural exclusionary processes of double Othering (e.g. bell hooks), but also encounter utopian political concepts on transcending the categories of gender/sex/race altogether (Haraway).