2025-2026 Academic Catalog

Jun 27, 2025

2025-2026 Academic Catalog

MCA 116 - Sex in the 90s: Pre-Y2K Media and Culture

In the 1990s, everywhere one turned one’s head and cocked an ear sex was being pictured and it was being discussed. This was true of media’s most popular genres and forms. The “battle of the sexes,” aka men and women’s debates around sex and its significance, waged across the decades’ dozens of romantic comedies. Meanwhile Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh, 1989) explored men and women’s fears around sex, intimacy, and the suffocating norms of wedded monogamy, paving the way at independent film festivals for the New Queer Cinema film movement. On TV, gay characters, once only bit parts and the butts of jokes, were coming out en masse, from Ellen Morgan, Ellen DeGeneres’ character on the sitcom Ellen (1994-98), to Willow Rosenberg, Buffy’s nerdy best friend on the supernatural teen series Buffy (1997-2003). Mid-decade, AIDS finally became a matter of substantive national discourse. And the decade closed with a highly sensationalized presidential sex scandal taking the budding 24-hour news cycle by storm. This course delves into this historical and cultural context and studies it by way of some of its most popular and controversial media texts, including films, TV series, music videos, and videogames. While students are expected to leave the class more knowledgeable about “sex in the 90s,” the subject provides a thematic stomping ground for an introduction to media and cultural studies. Students will read canonical texts in the field, including Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and scholarly works that apply key ideas from such theory to the study of 90s media and culture.

Prerequisites: Writing placement or IDND 018

Course Designation/Attribute: VE, WE

Anticipated Terms Offered: periodically