This course looks at a range of genres associated with female audiences in the US since the late 19th century across print, film, television, and new media. These include sentimental novels, gothic romances, magazines, "women's pictures," soaps, chick flicks, fanfic and Tumblr. What is the relation between mass culture aimed at women, cultural production by women, and feminist politics and critique? How do race, class, gender identity, and sexuality intersect with gendered genre conventions, discourses of authorship and critical evaluation, and the paradoxes of popular cultural pleasures?