Gendering Genre: Negotiating Gender and Power in American Genre Texts

ANG-V1

7.110107

Dozenten

Beschreibung

Have you ever been in the mood for a comedy rather than a drama? Then you’ll immediately know which thumbnails to skip on Netflix. Because, in spite of what a famous proverb says, we actually can and do judge a book by its cover (or a movie by its poster). The use of certain images, color palettes, type fonts, and titles allows us to assess with a fairly high degree of certainty to which genre a novel or a movie belongs and who its intended audience would be. Just by looking at these paratextual elements, we can usually tell if a text is a readout book made for children, a hyperbolically violent action movie targeted at teenaged boys, or a romantic comedy produced for a predominantly female audience. Without ever having consciously acquired these skills, we are all very versed in decoding genre markers and we frequently base our reading and viewing choices on notions of genre.

But aside from allowing us to pick what we like, the concept of genre has always been entangled with issues of political power, cultural capital, and social change. Not only are generic markers often interpreted as indicators of quality (e.g. some genres are deemed to be more “sophisticated” than others), they are also extremely gendered categories. Dismissive labels like “melodrama,” “chick-lit,” or “housewife porn” (a term coined for E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy) reveal that a genre's presumed artistic merits are inexorably intertwined with a genre’s gendering. Genres which are discursively coded as “male” are much more likely to be considered “highbrow” or “serious” than genres primarily understood to be “female.” Whereas, for example, the Western, as an inherently “masculine” genre, is frequently the focus of critical attention, romances, as an allegedly “feminine” genre, rarely receive the same amount of appreciation, even though they tend to be financially much more successful.

This seminar will explore notions of gender and genre in American literature and film from the 1850s to the present. Starting with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as examples of sentimental and domestic fiction, we will discuss various representatives of major genres such as gothic tales, Westerns, detective stories, romances, science fiction, and romantic comedies in order to examine the complex connections between genre and gender in the cultural history of the United States. Since the seminar will place the primary materials alongside various texts on gender studies, genre theory, and cultural history, this will be a reading-intensive course that covers a lot of textual and historical ground. The aim of the seminar is to understand how genre categorizations still function as gatekeepers for maintaining cultural hegemony and how artists both comply with and subvert genre conventions in order to acquire political agency.

Weitere Angaben

Ort: nicht angegeben
Zeiten: Di. 14:00 - 16:00 (wöchentlich)
Erster Termin: Dienstag, 14.04.2020 14:00 - 16:00
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar (Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen)

Studienbereiche

• Veranstaltungen > Europäische Studien > Bachelor-Studiengang > Nebenfach Kulturwissenschaft / Anglistik
• Veranstaltungen > Anglistik; Englisch > Kulturwissenschaft > Bachelor
• Courses in English > Language and Literary Studies
• Veranstaltungen > Anglistik; Englisch > Literaturwissenschaft > Bachelor
• Geschlechterforschung