Media, What Is It Good For?

I have chosen to take Mediating Gender & Sexuality because I am actively interested in pursuing gender studies.  I have taken many courses that touch upon queer and women’s studies, but I have not had the opportunity to take my previous knowledge and apply it to a communication course. From this course, I hope to better understand how the media perceives society and in turn, how it chooses to reflect its interpretation through different media forms. I wish to also seek how the media perpetuates socially constructed norms (i.e. the feminine ideal, etc.), but also how it may work against societal norms in certain ways I am not aware of. 

Upon examining how gender and sexuality is portrayed within the media, I feel it is extremely important to study this topic because it affects each individual every day. The amount of media society consumes each day is remarkable, but perhaps each person does not fully understand how much of an impact it truly has upon their lives. By viewing media texts through different theoretical lenses, it will allow me to gain a better understanding for the world of media as a whole. I can employ key concepts and ideas I will learn from scholarly texts to better comprehend how the media chooses to portray men and women and why they choose to depict them in that manner.