Introduction to Visual Culture

Survey of visual culture, from issues of production, circulation and reception to how visual media have historically exerted power, elicited desire, and constructed social experience. Topics include: how photography, television, film, video, Internet, advertising, comics, and other imagery code vision and inscribe race, gender, sexuality and class differences, and dominate nature and animals; how the gaze links cultural performativity, from the coliseum to shopping malls and museums to sports events; and how the rhetoric and semiotics of representation provide access to ways in which visual meaning is socially, politically, and culturally produced and obtained. (Team-taught.)