Who Is Steven Universe? The Lavender Screen as a Mirror of Media Literacy

• In Event: Constructing Representations: The Role of Media in Shaping Perceptions Across Contexts

Abstract

The development of a university-based course for First-Year Students on the history of Queer cinema highlighted the intersection of personal identity, academic responsibility and Queer aesthetics. Unexpectedly, it also illuminated a “generational media-gap” in how students accessed, learned and experienced LGBTQ images vs. their instructor’s experience.
While focusing on three overlapping phases of course development (course construction, teaching, and evaluation), issues of media literacy specifically related to LGBTQ representations emerged as a critical cross-generational dynamic. Rooted in subjectivity, the instructor’s initial vision could only be achieved when it actively incorporated the complement of First-Year Students’ contribution to how a history of Queerness and film could be delineated, experienced and co-constructed as the course was developed for subsequent sections.

Author

• Alan D. Amtzis, The College of New Jersey