Poslední úprava: Assistant Professor Gyorgy Toth, PhD. (30.07.2014)
This course will provide a critical and historical introduction to the representation of human sexuality in American popular culture from World War II to the present, including key examples from literature, cinema, television, comics, music, and fashion. We will consider how sexual norms have been represented through shifting views of heterosexual romance and the American family, while we pay particular attention to how those norms have been countered or challenged by representations of sexual minorities, especially gays and lesbians. We will also consider the ways in which audiences - mainstream and subcultural - have negotiated popular representations of sexuality, and we will consider the extent to which sexual fantasies are public and political as well as private and erotic. The historical focus of the course will demand attention to depictions of the post-war baby boom, the rise of youth culture, the sexual revolution, the women’s and gay liberation movements, the AIDS crisis, contemporary queer culture, and the post-9/11 retrenchment of traditional gender roles and sexualities.
This course will be useful for students of Cold War and post-Cold War U.S. history, especially social and cultural history, as well as to those studying the ‘revolutions’ of the 1960s and their lasting legacy, and students interested in how popular culture and the entertainment business both reflects and shapes social attitudes and practices. Last but not least, this course should ideally help you think through how gender and sexuality works in glaring and subtle ways in your own life and society.
