Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of Massachusetts Amherst/Race, Gender and the Sitcom (Fall 2014)/Course description

This course offers students with a broad survey of critical and cultural studies of the television sitcom form. Rather than assume that we all know and agree on what a TV situation comedy is, we will consider the various ways in which the form has remained one of the most popular forms of entertainment in electronic media as it continually adapts from radio to the early years in television and now in Cyberspace.

The course guides student examination of specific relationships between televisual-representational strategies and reception practices, and modes of subjectivity such as sex, race, and class status within the context of the genre. Students consider together and individually through reflective writings and in class group activities, raced and gendered media portrayals within the context of the sitcom. The students are challenged to examine how such portrayals both reflect and inform their own and group cultural assumptions about who and what we are as a people and how we interact within society. In addition, students look at ways in which the sitcom offers a historical commentary about the given social and cultural structures from which the specific shows emerge and examine why it has remained one of the most elastic but lasting genres in the medium of TV and beyond the frame.

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