course

Course Credit:  3

Since 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which sought to desegregate American schools, the people of the United States have been engaged in what some have come to call the “culture wars” in which even the most intimate things have become subject to politicization: sex, marriage, language, education, spiritual life, housing patterns, gun ownership, art, music, movies, literature, media, sports, access to bathrooms. Everything from abortion and bussing in schools to Gamergate and Drag Queen Story Hour falls under the rubric of a longstanding, and increasingly tribal culture war in the United States. In this course we will look at the broad historical context – segregation, Cold War, Vietnam, the Summer of Love – from which these battles emerged and trace them through the present, paying particularly close attention to the ways in which the legal expansion of rights, freedoms, and liberties for historically marginalized groups often elicited conservative reactions seeking to roll back those gains. Through open discussion, the politicization and policing of everything as a means of reasserting a traditionalist, and often sectarian, vision of culture on an increasingly liberal (and liberated) secular society will be examined. This course will focus on flashpoints or sites of contestation—Roe v. Wade, the reaction to the artist Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), the Oklahoma City Bombing, the North Carolina “Bathroom Bill” and many others – via contemporaneous media coverage and analysis. Students will produce written responses to the readings and also formulate a final project (with a written component) urgent to the awareness of policing and politicization of contemporary culture. (Satisfies Social Science)