Transy Library: FYRS -- First Year Research Seminar (Winter 2024): Sipple

Who Run the World? Gender and Pop Culture

This course examines pop culture through the lens of gender. Throughout the semester, we will use cultural criticism from authors like Roxane Gay, Lindy West, Jia Tolentino, Hanif Abdurraqib, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and others as a jumping off point to examine the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexuality as it relates to popular culture. Our dissection of television, film, music, literature, and other pop culture artifacts will help us strive to determine how gender is represented within pop culture and how that representation shapes our larger identities.

Possible Catalog Searches

Here are some example searches on your class topic in the library catalog. To conduct your own searches, go to the library homepage.

Featured Books

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
ISBN: 9780062282712
Publication Date: 2014-08-05
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation .
Buy Black by Aria S. Halliday
ISBN: 9780252053269
Publication Date: 2022-04-26
Far-ranging and bold, Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based in representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture.
Gender and Pop Culture by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek
ISBN: 9789004411586
Publication Date: 2019
Gender and Pop Culture provides a foundation for the study of gender, pop culture, and media.
A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
ISBN: 9781984801197
Publication Date: 2021-03-30
A sweeping, genre-bending "masterpiece" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity.
Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
ISBN: 1620974363
Publication Date: 2019-01-08
Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
You've Come a Long Way, Baby by Lilly J. Goren (Editor)
ISBN: 9780813173405
Publication Date: 2009-05-22
You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture investigates the role of popular culture in women's lives.

Gather Background Information

Use broad reference materials to find out background information about your topic. This will help you narrow your future searches and will also give you keywords to find the most relevant sources. Credo can be a good place to start for that first step in research.

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference provides access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology.

Databases

Below are suggested databases with scholarly articles on these topics.

Need more options? Library Databases A-Z

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. Includes searchable PDF content going back as far as 1887.
Communications and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides articles in areas related to communication and mass media. CMMC offers cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 500 journals, and selected coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 690 titles. Furthermore, this database includes full text for over 380 journals.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Provides articles from 1,900+ scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and sciences and around 5,000 ebooks. Coverage dates for journals are from the very first issue of each journal (the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries for many) and continues to 2 – 5 years prior to the current year (moving wall).
TU Library has access to Arts & Science Collections I through XI and XV, and the Life Sciences Collection as well as 5,000 ebooks. JSTOR has opened access to all its journal collections to its platform through June 30, 2023 for institutions that already had a relationship with them.
PsycArticles This link opens in a new window
PsycARTICLES®, from the American Psychological Association (APA), is a definitive source of full text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. It contains more than 153,000 articles from nearly 80 journals published by the American Psychological Association (APA), its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychological Association and the Hogrefe Publishing Group. It includes all journal articles, book reviews, letters to the editor, and errata from each journal. Coverage spans 1894 to the present and nearly all APA journals go back to Volume 1, Issue 1.
Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive database covering topics in emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational & experimental methods. This is the world’s largest full text psychology database offering full text coverage for over 560 journals.
Sociological Collection This link opens in a new window
Access to more than 500 full text journals, including nearly 500 peer-reviewed titles. Sociological Collection offers information in all areas of sociology, including social behavior, human tendencies, interaction, relationships, community development, culture and social structure.