Popular culture is an important site for creating, challenging, and transmitting meanings about race, gender, and sexuality. Black popular culture, both in the United States and globally, has particular appeal as a fraught and contested site of meaning-making, power, and self- and communal definition. What can we learn about blackness, gender, and sexuality using the lens of popular culture, and what can critical approaches in Black Studies, Black Queer Theory, and Black Feminism reveal about the meanings made in Black popular culture? In this course, we will examine how Black creators construct and are constructed by popular culture in the U.S. by building a set of critical tools that can help us navigate this rich terrain. We will explore topics such as representations of Black genders and Black sexualities, ideologies and popular culture, fandom, desire and disgust, and subversive media over a wide range of Black popular culture artifacts. We will examine film, television, digital media, photography, music videos, music, theatre, and other artifacts of interest to the class. Throughout the course, we will trouble the term “popular" and think deeply about questions of power, transmission, and affect. Students will help build the syllabus by contributing chosen readings during the second half of the semester. Final projects can be papers, syllabi, field lists with annotated bibliographies, or creative projects. Senior undergraduate participation by instructor approval only.