Class Rationale
In this class, we will examine how traditional women's texts are translated into the digital and the significance of this transfer in order to investigate how and why the digital is being marketed to women. This investigation aims to analyze how the concept of womanhood is changing as constructed in the digital, and to see if/how these changes affect other representations. The class will orient around several text-types, including:
- beauty sites
- weight loss
- recipe / cooking sites
- photo sites
- wedding sites
- mags - cosmo
- oxygen web
- discussion and forum sites
- subculture - goth and gurl sites
- cosmetic surgery / medical procedure sites
- porn by and for women
- women's tv, music, movie, and book websites
- video games
Assignments
Inness, Sherri. Cookbooks article
cooking component of websites for women // and weightloss websites targetted
at women
Readings
- Inness, Sherri. Cookbooks article
- Women, Art, and Technology
- women's magazine websites: cosmo, marie clare
- makeup websites
- teen/girl sites :: cosmo girls, gurl.com
- weight watchers website
- wolf, naomi. The Beauty Myth.
- Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media.
- Bolter and Grusin. Remediation
- Neo-Baroque
- Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex
- cyberfem readings
- cyberculture readings
- video games to see how they formulate concepts of woman