These days, scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in her 2018 study Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, “it feels as if everywhere you turn there is an expression of feminism – on a T-shirt, in a movie, in the lyrics of a pop song, in an inspirational Instagram post, in an award ceremony” (1). Yet if its ubiquity has grown in the last half decade or so, bolstered by activist movements that have gained traction on and offline, feminism is neither a new phenomenon nor a singular one. Indeed, the idea of feminism continues to evolve as activists, academics, and regular women alike contemplate and debate what it means, what it does, and where it meets its limits. In this course, you’ll study a small but illustrative range of responses to these lines of inquiry, encountering modes of feminist expression that extend across various genres and considering how they might relate to your everyday lives. In doing so, you’ll probe ideas and ask questions about intersectionality, objectification, embodiment, and power that have long been central to, and often contested within, feminist thinking. We’ll start the course with literature. Next, you’ll engage critical feminist theory. Finally, you’ll pursue research essays and related group capstone projects that return to Banet-Weiser’s discussion of “popular feminism” (and its detractors) to interrogate how pop culture – including film, television, music, and even social media – markets and communicates feminism to a public audience.