Wednesdays 4:00-6:00 PM

August 25, 2021 - September 22, 2021

Application Deadline: August 4, 2021

Pending COVID restrictions, this microseminar will be offered in person on the MIT campus.

What does it mean to perform the self in today's media climate, especially if that self lies beyond the white/male/straight hegemonic order? What happens when these marginalized subjects go mainstream? And what happens when the self becomes nothing more than a capitalist commodity, easily exploited or appropriated for monetary or other gain? Taking works by Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and others as a theoretical foundation and adopting an intersectional approach to the material, this mini-course explores these and related questions. Together, we’ll analyze how selfhood and subjectivity is performed in a variety of media genres, from contemporary memoirs to reality TV to social media. We’ll read literature and essays by Carmen Maria Machado, Ocean Vuong, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, and Sarah J. Jackson, and we’ll consider new media phenomena like Netflix’s Queer Eye, Harry & Meghan, Instagram influencers, and the curious case of Hilaria Baldwin. We’ll explore, more broadly, how subjects and selves not only become legible through these media but how these media forms, in turn, dictate or regulate the parameters of who becomes legible in the first place. In sum, the course suggests that if the gendered/racial/sexed self has always been a construct, then the vicissitudes of the 21st century and its technologies have helped to de- and re-construct it in profound ways that demand our further attention.

Faculty

Dr. Alexandra Gold is a Preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program. She has, since 2018, taught a first-year writing course on feminism, art, and social media, for which she has been recognized with four Certificates of Teaching Excellence from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education. She earned her Ph.D. in English and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Boston University. Her research and teaching interests include post-1945 American poetry and visual art, women’s studies, popular culture, and critical pedagogy. Her research and writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, Genre, Word & Image, Feminist Pedagogy, and Women’s Studies, and she is currently at work on a book that explores collaborations between 20th and 21st century poets and painters in artist’s book form. For more on her work and teaching, visit www.alexandrajgold.com or follow her on Twitter @agold258.