“Media, Race, & Gender” was an interdisciplinary course that explored representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality through an intersectional and intertextual examination of various media forms. We explored how representation as objects, consumers, subjects, creators, challengers, and critics both reflect and produce sociocultural phenomena and ideas about society. This course allowed me to understand how cultural meaning is created, contested, and regulated. It also illuminated the ways in which we are passive consumers of media and showed me how to become a more critical participant. The course also served as my formal introduction into media theory, from its interdisciplinary relevance to the historical development of media itself. Through various topics, such as sex and gender construction in the media and expressions of femininity and masculinity, the course also endowed me with various theoretical tools to approach media studies with.

Many of these theoretical tools translated into critical skills I applied to my own research. I learned to use reason, evidence and context to discuss constructions of gender, namely femininity and masculinity, within the media. Although the course’s heavy emphasis on gender made it slightly harder to draw parallels to my research, it proved useful when discussing black cultural identity in terms of the media’s portrayal of black womanhood and black masculinity (largely physicality) in my thesis. This further enabled me to make critical distinctions within contemporary discourses and debates about the impact of media and culture on the lives of African Americans.

I also found myself applying some of the theories introduced in the course to aspects of visual and material culture that arose in my investigation of Negrophilia. bell hooks, a noted academic and feminist social activist, proved to be one of my most cited theorists. Her scholarship on on race, capitalism, and gender, namely her theory of the White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, came to be an integral part of my theoretical framework surrounding Negrophilia. Other scholarly articles, such as "Black Women and Black Men in Hip Hop Music: Misogyny, Violence, and the Negotiation of [White-Owned] Space," also proved fruitful.

The assignments in the course allowed me to apply what I had learnt through semiotic textual analysis. Our first major assignment, for example, asked us to review an assigned film and analyze its themes. The film I was assigned was Jordan Peele’s 2015 film Get Out. I chose to analyze its implicit critique of post-racial discourse in America, which I drew heavily upon in my thesis. Our second major assignment was a critical analysis of two commercials. I chose Pepsi’s controversial 2017 commercial featuring Kendall Jenner and a widely acclaimed Cheerios Super Bowl commercial, both of which centered on implicit and explicit racial narratives. These assignments and the course as a whole certainly furthered my understanding and engagement with representations of race in media.