New University of Colorado Boulder course to explore feminism through Disney female characters
The course is called “Disney’s Women and Girls.”
The university’s Women and Gender Studies Department is offering the course next semester.
The University of Colorado Boulder students will have the opportunity to study examples of Disney’s female characters in a feminist context.
Students will specifically learn “how mass media acts to enforce and maintain conventional gendered understandings of power, privilege and difference.” The course appears on the university’s Women and Gender Studies course list for the spring semester and is titled “Disney’s Women and Girls.”
A course description on the university’s website says that the class “[e]xamines the construction of gender, race, class, sexual orientation and disability in a selection of Disney’s animated films,” “[c]ultivates skills of media literacy, exploring how mass media acts to enforce and maintain conventional gendered understandings of power, privilege and difference,” and “[a]nalyzes the political economy of the Disney phenomenon through a feminist lens.”
The course does not currently have a listed faculty for next semester.
According to its homepage, the Women and Gender Studies Department is “home to one of the most culturally diverse faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder.”
“We welcome students of color, LGBTQ+ students, first generation college students, students of various ethnic backgrounds, and all students interested in learning about gender and sexuality in a range of cultural and historical contexts,” the description continues.
Other Women and Gender Studies courses next spring include “Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture,” “Women, Gender, Literature and the Arts,” “Gender, Race, Science and Technology,” “Gender and Latin American Politics,” and “Feminist Fictions.”
One way the Department achieves this goal is to maintain what it calls the “Gender Justice League.” The League allows select students to apply social justice principles to practical situations.
A drop-down section titled “Abortion” on the League’s webpage has thirteen different resources for students, including links to Planned Parenthood. Other resources teach students how to obtain birth control and how both men and women can masturbate.
Colleges and universities routinely offer courses that teach students feminist thought from a variety of different angles. Smith College in Massachusetts, for example, is providing a course on “Marxist Feminsim” next semester.
The course uses the “simple insight” that “capitalism relies on the class politics of unpaid, reproductive ‘women’s work.’”
Campus Reform contacted the University of Colorado and the Women and Gender Studies Department, asking what they hope students get from the course. This story will be updated accordingly.
