Participants will have an opportunity to explore their own class identities and reactions to the material through weekly journals. A final, referenced synthesis paper will compare and contrast the oral history of a working class woman interviewed by each student with a work of fiction or biography of the student s choice providing an opportunity to integrate the course material, creating space for new perspectives. The course will be interdisciplinary in nature and informed by some of the most recent feminist and critical scholarship emerging in criminology and gender studies today. We will also examine how this writing makes significant contributions to not just how we might think about the justice system, but world culture in general. The importance in studying film lies in the fact that the message that films offer viewers provides them with the tools of interaction for everyday life.
Films provide people with stories to interpret their world.
In addition, films supply viewers with the characters, through stereotypes, with which they will interact in their everyday life. They also provide viewers with stereotypes for interpreting their own potential and opportunities in life. By looking at the stories and the characters in film, we can better understand the messages of gender and race they are conveying. However, gender and race intersect to create the stereotypes used to compared and to construct identities and stories. Therefore, this class will focus on the intersections of gender and race in American film.