CMCL-C 334: Current Topics in Communication and Culture
(Topic: Beauty Culture)
Class Number: 11393
Summer Session II

MTuWThF, 12:30 PM-1:20 PM, SY 004

Meets with GNDR-G 302


Instructor: Shana Heinricy
E-Mail: sheinric@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 254
Phone: 855-0844

This course seeks to critically examine the role of beauty in
American culture.  Concerns about beauty are pervasive, affecting a
wide variety of facets of life, including health, self-image, love,
and work.  In this class, beauty is not considered something that
someone either possesses or does not possess.  Instead, beauty is an
action performed.  It is a process of altering the body to make it
better conform to particular gendered ideals which structure our
lives.  We explore the rhetoric of beauty, performances of beauty,
and beauty in the media. The course is divided into four parts.
First, we explore critiques of beauty culture.  We then examine the
origins of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.  Third, we
examine the role of beauty in shaping identity, including
individual, community, and national identity.  This section studies
beauty pageants, hair salons, and aerobics classes as sites in which
beauty and identity are enacted.  Finally, we consider the ways in
which bodies are altered for beauty, theorizing plastic surgery,
body building, and anorexia.  Assignments in this class include
weekly forum postings, a creative log of beauty instances from pop
culture, an ethnographic study of a site of beauty, and a final
paper analyzing a specific instance of beauty in popular culture.
Students may receive credit in Gender Studies or in Communication
and Culture, depending on the course number under which they
register.  E-mail sheinric@indiana.edu with any questions about the
course.

Readings include:

Balsamo, Anne. (1996). Technologies of the gendered body: Reading
cyborg women. Durham: Duke University Press.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. (1999). The most beautiful girl in the world:
Beauty pageants and national identity.  Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Bordo, Susan. (2003). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture,
and the body.  Berkley: University of California Press.

Gimlin, Debra L. (2002). Body work: Beauty and self-image in
American culture. Berkley: University of California Press.

Peiss, Kathy. (1998). Hope in a jar: The making of America’s beauty
culture. New York: Henry Holt.

Wolf, Naomi. (1991). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used
against women. Anchor Books: Random House.