Sexuality in Contemporary Media
Assignments
Make sure to post your assignment as an attachment. Bring a printed copy to class to hand in.
If more than three assignments have not been posted in time you cannot take the exam. All
assignments have to be posted on Brightspace before the last class of the course. Failing to do
so means you cannot do the exam. Three of your assignments will be graded and will be
included in the calculation of your final grade. One of these three you choose during the first
class (your choice is final), and two are chosen, at random, by the instructor. If the average
grade of the assignments is lower than 5,5 you need to do one or more of them again to
improve your grade. The deadline for these assignments is the same as the deadline for the
exam (first chance).
Number of words: Between 500 and 600 (excl. footnotes).
Name of Archive: “YourName-Assignment#”
Save and post your work in a Word or PDF format! Assignments and papers should be typed,
with a spacing of 1.5, font Times Roman 11, ample margins on both sides for comments, and
they should have footnotes. Count the number of words (excl. footnotes) and type the number
at the bottom of the last page of your paper. Make sure your name, student number, name of
the course and date are at the top of the first page. Footnote references must have a chapter
and/or page number. Check how to do footnotes correctly.
When you are drawing on the works (books, articles, texts on websites) of others, make sure
to account for this with a footnote at the bottom of the page (i.e. not an endnote at the end of
the text). The number of the note should be placed after the full stop or quotation mark at the
end of the sentence that contains somebody else’s ideas or words. Check how to do footnotes
correctly.
Deadline: On the day of class, before 9.00 am.
Readings (+ the handouts)
- The Secret Museum
- Viewers Make Meaning
- Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity
- Pornosphere
- Girls + Sex and The City
- Interactive Sex
- Porno? Chic!
- Empowerment/ Sexism
- Female Chauvinist Pigs
- Beyond the “Sexualization of Culture”
- APA Task Force on the Sexualisation of Girls
, - Too much too young?: Young people, sexual media and learning
- Born into porno: Kids in a pornified world
- Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility
- Representing Lesbians in Film and Television
- Orange is the New Black
- God Hates Cowboys (Kind of)
- An Affair To Remember
- On the Universality of Brokeback
- Lonesome Cowboys
Lecture 1: SEEING THINGS
We focus on a set of processes that have been referred to as: sexualization, pornographication
and pornification. They refer to a “more”.
· They refer to images in mainstream media culture that are more explicit.
· The second idea is that there are more images than ever found before.
· The third idea refers to the fact that more people have access to such images.
It’s thought of as a problematic development, there is an unease: sex has left its proper media
domain and has entered media it should not be at.
There are worries about the effects of this process.
Images produce all kinds of undesirable effects: in the field of gender, we have the
sexualization of women and their bodies, women are objectified with sexual harassment and
violence towards women. Another demographic is young people, it leads them to undesirable
behaviours: having sex too early, teen pregnancies, and the creation of unrealistic
expectations of what sex and bodies are. There are also people that argue that they are just
images, and we should not be so worried, this is a source of pleasure and entertainment, it
feeds our fantasy, we escape from everyday life. All of them assume a lot about images and
pretend to know about the effect of these images and how these effects are being produced.
Very often there are unidirectional theories: images cause effects, they do things. There is
also an assumption that looking will lead to doing things. Also, it is believed that there is a
direct connection between images and emotional states.
Sturken & Cartwright - before assuming that the image is sexual we should look more into it.
The images begin with meaning: there is an assumption that the meanings of an image are
easy; it is much more complex.
Meaning is complex.
- It depends on the image itself and what the producer tried to do with it.
- It relies on conventions, implicit cultural agreements between us that define what
is acceptable.
- It is the result of the person who is doing the looking, the viewer. Between
cultures and individuals, the meanings might be different.
- Last, the context, where and when you see the image creates a different meaning.
