GSWS 205 Gender and Popular Culture

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This guide will assist with finding information on gender, media and popular culture. 

Contact info

For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies by email (moninder_lalli@sfu.ca) or Ask a librarian.

Selected encyclopedias

Encyclopedias, handbooks or textbooks provide overviews, definitions and identify key authors and ideas.

Selected material from the course syllabus

Books

Films

Find books in the Library

How to use the Library Catalogue  [guide]

Do a Library Catalogue search to see if the Library owns or provides access to the sources that you've identified. 

For known items it is best to check using "Browse by title" icon.

Search by topic, using Basic or Advanced Search

Note: Searches can be limited to "Online Resources only" and "Resource type" of "Books" and selected "Subjects"

To search for a particular television show, use Advanced Search, "Subject contains" and then enter  name of the show

   Buffy, the vampire slayer (Television program)

Proper syntax for Boolean logic (words that allow you to combine concepts)

Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words

Note:  For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")

Look at the titles in the "results list" and for those books that look relevant, click on their subject headings to find more books on that topic.

 

Selected books

Browse search

Choose: Browse tab, change "title" to "subject"

For books about a person, search for the person as "Subject" using "Advanced Search" or "Browse by subject"

E.g.  Baker, Josephine

 Browse by Subject (change the default "Title" to "Subject")

Journal articles, news and primary sources

Searching the "Databases for a discipline" is a great strategy to view articles that have been written within the scholarly journals of that discipline.  Limit search results to academic or scholarly articles.  If full-text of article is not available from within the database, click on the "Get@SFU" link to find it or to initiate an inter-library loan request.

For help, refer to the How to find journal articles, What is a scholarly journal?, Finding articles: Advanced search techniques [video 3:13 mins]

  • Women's Studies International - key database for feminist perspectives
    • Keyword searches:
      • (media or popular culture) and (portray* or represent*)
      • (media or popular culture) and (women or gender or queer or gay or gays or lesbian* or homosexual*)
      • Burlesque or Neoburlesque or stripping or "strip tease"
         
  • Communication and Mass Media Complete  - Important database for "popular culture", "social media" and "mass media" topics
  • Academic Search Premier - Multidisciplinary index to academic and popular journals. Indexes many women's studies journals.
  • CBCA Fulltext Reference - Covers Canadian topics including business, politics, literature, history and news event

Dance, film, literature, music and performing arts

For scholarly articles on films or television shows, you may also wish to search the databases below:

News databases

For newspaper stories, check out the databases below:

  • Canadian Newsstand - Full-text of major Canadian newspapers.
  • Historical Newspapers - Includes the Washington Post (1877 - 1990); Wall Street Journal (1889 - 1989); New York Times (1851 - 36-month embargo)
  • Times digital archive - Full-text and full-image articles from the Times of London for the years 1785-1985.

Primary sources databases

A primary source is a document or other sort of evidence written or created during the time under study, or by one of the persons or organizations directly involved in the event. Primary sources offer an inside view of a particular event. Types of primary sources include: original documents (excerpts or translations are acceptable): diaries, speeches, letters, minutes, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, official records.

  • Archives of Sexuality & Gender - Monographs, manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera from 1600 to 1940, as well as texts, photographs, and illustrations on health, politics, age, race/ ethnicity, and social and economic issues in relation to LGBTQ rights and women's rights since 1940.
  • Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975 - Colour images of manuscripts and rare printed materials, as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia covering popular culture in Britain, America, and Canada from 1950 to 1975.
  • Victorian Popular Culture - Search across four collections on popular entertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
    • E.g. search for "burlesque" results in articles in magazines, billboards, etc.  See an example, below:

Chatfield-Taylor, O. (1936, 10). SHE STRIPS TO CONQUER. Town & Country, 91, 82. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.sfu.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/docview/2120635594?accountid=13800

For more, see  Primary Sources for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies (GSWS)
Citing primary sources

Websites and YouTube

Advertising

  • Ad Access Project (Duke University Library) - images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II, providing a coherent view of a number of major campaigns and companies through images preserved in one particular advertising collection available at Duke University. [from the website].
  • Bitch Media - "feminist response to pop culture"
  • Gender Ads Project  - "This site is an educational resource that focuses on the ways in which gender (and related issues like sexuality, social class, race, etc.) and advertising intersect. The primary focus of this Web site is print advertising."  
  • Examples from Gender Ads Project:

Media

Music videos, soap operas, and television

YouTube

Example of a video series analyzing misogyny in video games

Writing help and other library guides