Course: QS 204. Queer Identity: Pop Music and Its Audience (3)
This course analyzes queer identity and its relation to pop music, focusing primarily on explicit representations of LGBTQ themes, experiences, characters, and communities in pop music. Course themes include positive images, creation of alternative space, AIDS, coming out, celebrity, and the gay audience. Through close readings of queer theory and criticism, we will analyze the phenomenon of queer music by exploring the contested relationships between spectator and text, identity and commodity, realism and fantasy, activism and entertainment, desire and politics.