Theorizing hegemonic mass media as one of the most important “information-diffusing socializing agencies” in the U.S., this course allows students to develop the competencies necessary for analyzing media codes and conventions and interpreting the myriad meanings and ideologies generated by media texts. More specifically, we explore how gender, sexuality, race, class, citizenship, and other social, cultural, and political markers are constructed in mass media, including the multidimensional impetuses for and implications of these constructions. Additionally, since counter-hegemonic texts, as well as audience interpretations of these texts, have the potential to “challenge central political positions and cultural assumptions,” we study the ways in which media texts and audiences revise, resist, reject, and reproduce these narratives.