Dykes, witches, and cults

Women's Studies' in Mass Culture

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4868965
AutoresRachel Corbman (0009-0009-4503-7900, Arizona State University, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume26
Fascículo3
Páginas614-631
Data de publicação2025-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001251331883
OpenAlexW4410488551
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas19

Feminist scholars have generated a vibrant body of work on the history and state of the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Yet, little has been written about how ideas about the field circulate in mass culture. This article has two goals. First, I offer a preliminary survey of how ideas about 'women's studies' and 'gender studies' took shape in the five decades following the institutionalisation of the first women's studies programmes in US colleges and universities in the 1970s. Second, this article zooms in on the representation of the field in two TV shows that aired in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election: the 2017 season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Horror Story , and the Charmed reboot (2018-2022). Through careful study of a pair of fictional women's studies students, I track the multiple, internally conflicting, and generationally distinct ideas about feminism that travel together in contemporary representations of the field. In doing so, I demonstrate how wildly inaccurate and pernicious ideas about the field take hold as collective common sense, participating, inadvertently or not, in the right's ongoing assault on the study of gender and sexuality

Feminism · Human sexuality · Institutionalisation · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Sports, Gender, and Society