ENGL 302 A: Critical Practice

Become your own cultural critic! This course provides students with tools or theories to analyze racialized representations of gender and sexuality in popular, contemporary American culture. We watch music videos and consider social media; we analyze marketing and interpret photography. We study how popular culture produces racialized masculinities and femininities, and we ponder the pleasures and perils of those productions. Students draw on theoretical texts in feminist theory and critical race studies to analyze culture. They draft, in addition to several short writing assignments, two essays. They work collaboratively to revise their writing, and they participate in many in-class writing exercises.