Assignment

Your project offers you the opportunity to bring together your critical thinking, research, and presentation skills. In a sixtoeight-page paper, you will combine original research, theoretical reading(s) from our course, and a pop culture production of your choice. You will write an annotated bibliography, rough draft, and final paper.

For this project choose one of the following:

• You could analyze how one type of queerness changes in one or more media form over time.

Example: You could trace representations of disabled characters on screen or over generations of tv (or both).

• You could analyze an emerging queerness in one or more media forms.

Example: You could explore the emergence of nonbinary genders in music and movies, or you might address how fan responses to certain forms of content have ledto the inclusion of queer characters, storylines, or relationships.

• You could apply two different pieces of theory as lenses to one pop culture product and contrast the two lensings.

Example: Applying Weston and Warner as lenses to a movie and contrastingwhat the episode has to say about each lens, and what we can learn about bothbybringing them together in this way.

Whichever of these options you choose, you should build a basis of research, bringing together two or more articles that contextualize the media form (i.e., the movie(s), the tv show(s), etc.). You should also bring in a minimum of one work of theory (or two, if you are undertaking the lensing option).

Feedback

You are off to a great start, here! You will need to bring in more examples of nonbinary genders, though. What other ones can you think of besides Ruby Rose? Consider David Bowie, one of the earliest celebrities to play with ideas of gender nonconformity.