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Nov 21, 2024
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2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog
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US 274 Witches & Warriors: Powerful Women in Pop Culture
Witches and female warriors offer two of the most iconic representations of powerful women in pop culture. Though these representations are often contested, debated, and tied to desirability, they also shape the way that our modern culture views feminine strength. This course will combine visual representations of witches and warriors in fiction with a variety of critical readings and seminar-style discussions to analyze the various ways that feminine power is represented in stories such as Aliens, The Witches of Eastwick, Xena, Wicked, and Star Wars to name a few. We will explore theoretical and archetypal concepts of beauty, sexuality, and power to establish working definitions of these concepts so that we may then apply them to the visual representations of iconic female characters of film, television, theater, and comics. Using theories from cultural studies, film and gender studies, and literary studies, we will explore how the cultural legacy of feminine power is tied to our notions of gender, race, social status, sexuality, identity, and agency.
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