125010 PS Proseminar Cultural and Media Studies (2012S)

In this course, we will investigate a wide range of textual and visual gender performances in order to explore manifestations of and challenges to gender norms in American culture. More specifically, we will concern ourselves with subversive bodily acts and gender performances in nineteenth-century American literature and recent popular culture, reading those texts against the grain and examining how they challenge normative constructions of masculinity and femininity. Underlying our discussion will be the presumption that the subversion of normative gender roles is not only a counter- or subcultural phenomenon, but has always been central to mainstream cultural productions. In this course, then, we will examine both gender as performance and gender in performance, analyzing how performance and bodily acts (re-)construct and (re-)invent gender norms.
Focusing on, for instance, acts of gender-bending and grotesque self-fashioning in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as well as Madonna's and Lady Gaga's music videos, or on homoeroticism and queer masculinities in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Ang Lee's film version of Brokeback Mountain, and the dissolution of gender in the poetry of Walt Whitman and John Cameron Mitchell's film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, we will raise questions of feminist and queer performance strategies, camp, cross-dressing, the representation of same-sex desire, and subversive bodily acts. Our examination of the primary material will be preceded by a discussion of crucial gender and performance theories by Richard Schechner, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and others, which will provide us with the theoretical framework and the methodological tools to critically analyze the trouble with gender in our primary texts.