LFU:online

To familiarize students with the relationship between film and culture by exploring a variety of historical and current approaches to feminism.

"Beyoncé, or as I call her, The Goddess […] has emerged, in recent years, as a visible feminist. At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, she performed in front of the word ‘feminist’ 10 feet high. It was a glorious spectacle to see this pop star openly embracing feminism and letting young women and men know that being a feminist is something to celebrate. As the moment faded, cultural critics began endlessly debating whether or not Beyoncé was, indeed, a feminist. They graded her feminism, instead of simply taking a grown, accomplished woman at her word" ––Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist.

In this course we will look at films, TV shows, and popular culture at large in order to review both different articulations of feminism and a variety of social attitudes towards feminism. Revisiting post-feminist debates, we will discuss the stakes of a more inclusive kind of feminism that embraces faults and failures, strategic commercialism, guilty pleasures as well as cultural paradoxes and contradictions.

Presentations, discussions, reading and writing assignments.

Students are encouraged to enlist for research topics and topics for discussion leading prior to the seminar.

Active participation, presentation with discussion leading, and a research paper

Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/roxane_gay_confessions_of_a_bad_feminist/discussion

As far as possible, course materials and selected secondary sources will be posted on OLAT.

BA 2015: positive completion of compulsory modules 10, 11 and 12