GNDR 380 Fandoms, Stanning, Gender and Sexualities in Popular Culture
This course explores how fandom and stan, or devoted superfan, online communities have transculturally and
globally complicated and reconstructed understandings of gender, sexualities, and popular media. This course
will also examine how fandom communities are spaces of online belonging for queer and marginalized worldbuildin
Prerequisites
4 Undergraduate credits
Effective May 2, 2024 to present
Meets graduation requirements for
Learning outcomes
General
- Explain the evolution and globalization of fandom and stan cultures and their possible social impacts outside of popular culture.
- Discuss how fandom and stan communities critique and challenge conventional notions and social constructions of gender binaries and sexualities.
- Analyze the contentions surrounding how geopolitics and identities complicate fandom and stan participation.
- Appraise how online spaces perpetuate white supremacy, racism, sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, queerbaiting, biphobia, homophobia, and transphobia.
- Synthesize the complexities concerning the digitization of identities in a changing world.
- Describe the possibilities of global subcultural kinships and worldbuilding in online spaces.
- Evaluate how fandom and stan cultures affect media literacy.
Minnesota Transfer Curriculum
Goal 5: History and the Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Employ the methods and data that historians and social and behavioral scientists use to investigate the human condition.
- Examine social institutions and processes across a range of historical periods and cultures.
- Use and critique alternative explanatory systems or theories.
- Develop and communicate alternative explanations or solutions for contemporary social issues.
Goal 7: Human Diversity
- Understand the development of and the changing meanings of group identities in the United States' history and culture.
- Demonstrate an awareness of the individual and institutional dynamics of unequal power relations between groups in contemporary society.
- Analyze their own attitudes, behaviors, concepts and beliefs regarding diversity, racism, and bigotry.
- Describe and discuss the experience and contributions (political, social, economic, etc.) of the many groups that shape American society and culture, in particular those groups that have suffered discrimination and exclusion.
- Demonstrate communication skills necessary for living and working effectively in a society with great population diversity.