Courses

This course will orient students to a variety of critical approaches—literary, anthropological, historical, sociological—on the study of gender in a genre (the modern Horror film) that is enormously popular and more than likely entirely familiar to these students. In this class we will address the following questions around cultural discourses of gender and bodies:

• How does popular culture conceive of “appropriate” femininity and masculinity?
• What “happens” to those who deviate from these norms and how is such a deviation dramatized in horror films and popular culture more generally?
• How does mainstream culture work to co-opt/mobilize/restrain gendered rebellion through its representations of purity (such as virginity and “whiteness”), adulthood (such as menarche and/or other signs of physical “maturity”) and maternity (such as childbirth and female sacrifice)?

By pairing Horror films from the late 1960s through to the present day with written texts across a range of fields, this course (like all courses I teach in Gender Studies) crosses disciplines. As such, it’s an excellent opportunity to familiarize students with a core premise of interdisciplinary inquiry: that strong critical thinking requires the crossing of intellectual boundaries, and that at its best, thinking across the disciplines leads to more engaging and creative scholarly work.

This course is eligible for honors credit through Hutton Honors College.

Catalog Information: COLL-S 103  FRESHMAN SEMINAR IN A&H

Instructor:

Jennifer Maher

Email:

jemaher@indiana.edu

Department:

Gender Studies

Dr. Maher completed a Ph.D. in English and Modern Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she worked previously as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching courses in Popular Culture, American Women's Literature, Third Wave Feminism, and Gender and the Body. Her most recent work focuses on representations of reproductive technology in popular. She has also published fiction and memoir in a variety of venues, including two Seal Press anthologies, Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth about Women's Friendships and Young Wives' Tales, and Brainchild Magazine. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Literature. Maher has frequently contributed to the thoroughly awesome magazine, Bitch: A Feminist Response to Popular Culture and her essay "Hot for Teacher: On the Erotics of Pedagogy" was featured in the collection Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism, an anthology of essays praised by critics as disparate as Robin Morgan and Margaret Cho. At Indiana University, Dr. Maher's area of expertise covers gender and popular culture; second and third wave feminism; gender and modern memoir, feminist history/theory, and the politics of reproduction. She recently finished teaching a class for the IU's Intensive First-year Seminar program entitled "Blood, Babies, and Chainsaws: Femininity and Horror." Currently, she is working on a larger project on gender and the representation of the teacher-student relationship in popular culture, as well as assisted reproductive technology and the (hetero)familial narrative in American film. Writing and more info can be found here: www.jenniferelizabethmaher.com

GenEd Information: Approved for the Arts & Humanities requirement of the IU Bloomington General Education program.