The Mediated Self: Doing Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the 21st Century

This course is a 5-week “microseminar” hosted by the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality at MIT. The GCWS is comprised of students and faculty from its member institutions: Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Simmons, Tufts, and UMass Boston. More information on the course, as well as GCWS & its upcoming seminars and events here.

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.