CTSJ 240 Advertising, Identity, and Power + SeeHer Certification
This course critically examines advertising as a powerful cultural technology that produces gender, race, sexuality, ability, desirability, and “the consumer self” within capitalist visual culture in the United States. Students explore how commercial media constructs norms, manufactures aspiration, and circulates inequality through narratives of so-called empowerment, diversity, and inclusion. Using semiotics, discourse analysis, feminist media studies, queer theory, intersectionality, critical disability studies, and cultural political economy, the course approaches advertising not as brand messaging but as a site of ideology, affect, and social control. To deepen applied understanding, students will complete the SeeHer Gender Equity in Media Certification, integrating it into the course as both an industry case study and an object of critical analysis. While earning the certificate, students interrogate its assumptions: What counts as gender equity when justice is measured by brand metrics? What forms of inclusion are rewarded, monetized, or overlooked? Can corporate visibility be liberatory, or does it risk becoming aspirational neoliberalism? This course is focused on the United States, and it's focus on race and gender satisfies the requirements for the US Diversity Core requirement.