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Up Next: A Twilight Degree

frau sally benz

I guess this answers the whole “Can feminists read/like Twilight?” question: California State University’s women’s studies program offered a course on Twilight this semester. From their special topics descriptions:

Topics in Women’s Studies: Twilight: The Text and the Fandom
Examines the Twilight saga and the resulting fandom. Explores Twlight in relation to the social and cultural construction of gender and gendered identities in contemporary U.S. culture. Using an intersectional lens emphasizing gender, race, class, sexuality, and belief, provides students with the conceptual and analytical foundations to think more deeply about popular culture and its impact. Covers vampire lore, the romantic core of the series, female characters and fans, the depiction of men and masculinity, religious contexts, race and white privilege, the franchising of Twilight, and various cultural contexts such as abstinence only education and the rise of internet fandoms.

I wonder how quickly this class filled up. Personally, the Women and Revolution in Cuba class seems more my speed. But these Twilight-themed courses are spreading like wildfire… I smell an interdisciplinary degree of some sort.

40 thoughts on Up Next: A Twilight Degree

  1. I wonder what the enrollment in a class like this looks like in a pro and anti-Twilight division. Do the teens who have essentially grown up with Twilight, who love the franchise sign up for this course? Do young women who are disgusted by the books sign up?

    And if it is the fans who show up, how will they react to a professor who wants to talk about the negative aspects of the books? Will their minds be opened? Will they see the story in a different light? Or will their dedication to the fad alienate them from women’s studies?

  2. I think it will depend on the fans in question, as well as the instructor’s attitude. It’s entirely possible to discuss a book’s problems and failings while being respectful of the people who enjoy it, and if this class helps to bring a little of that to the discussion of Twilight, so much the better.

  4. There are courses in HP and have been for years.

    I’d ask what level is this course? At (State University) we have a couple of different course levels that are pretty open to English instructors teaching whatever floats their boat, as long as it somehow fits into either a specific genre category or the catch-all “Women in Literature”. I’ve taught a “WIL” on Myths and Fairytales before, and the class had a fantastic reaction. I got some great critical papers, including one that argued (very persuasively) that modern female werewolf stories were a feminist genre, something I hadn’t considered before. I think it could be done quite well.

  5. Why shouldn’t a woman’s studies class engage with a piece of popular culture in a way that teaches students how to analyze it from an intersectional feminist point of view?

  6. The woman who teaches this course is Natalie Wilson and runs a blog “Seduced by Twilight” where she discusses all sorts of sexism & privilege in the Twilight series while still being a fan.

    She also has outlined her course and talks about the student reaction to topics covered in class. If you really want the inside info about what’s going on in that class, follow the blog. It’s like taking it online.
    http://seducedbytwilight.wordpress.com/

  7. Any school that offers courses in twilight studies should be stripped of it’s accreditations as it’s obvious that higher-order brain functions were not utilized in the decision making process.

    Twilight is anti-feminist drivel cobbled together by a Mormon fundie to promote an alternative to modern womanhood, end of discussion.

    1. I do not for the life of me understand the idea that things which are extremely popular are not worthy of study and analysis. Somehow ideas by theorists that the vast majority of people will never encounter are more worthy of our time and discussion than things that most of the people in our communities will spend a great deal of time with?

      Both have good reason to be discussed, critiqued, and picked apart. And both can be done. Both are done all the time. Hell, I took tons of classes in college that looked at highly popular texts through the lens of theories created by highly respected and generally inaccessible academics. The two things are hardly mutually exclusive, and if we strip all schools of their accreditation for essentially offering media studies, we’re going to have few schools left and the schools we do have left will be poorer off.

  9. Twilight is anti-feminist drivel cobbled together by a Mormon fundie to promote an alternative to modern womanhood, end of discussion.

    I think the point is that it really shouldn’t be “end of discussion.” Personally, I hate saying “end of discussion” about massively influential events (either positive or negative.) Much more productive to have a class about the thing rather than huffily dismiss it — I don’t see the value in throwing up your hands and saying “oh fine, little girls, absorb your stalker books unchallenged because I refuse to talk to you about them.”

    Saying “end of discussion” about something a lot of girls and women are really into sounds stuffy and out-of-touch, and it sure won’t win young hearts and minds over to feminism (if that’s what you’re after.) And this is coming from a person who already absolutely 100% agrees with the first 3/4 of your sentence. :p

  10. Alexandria: And that’s precisely the reason they’re worthy of study. These pieces of racist, misogynistic, pro-abuse trash are popular because they strike a chord in the public. They shine a mirror on society, and picking them apart academically reveals a lot about the culture that produced them.

  11. There’s also been a ton of misogyny in the response to the Twilight trend and the mostly female fans. No matter how much I hate the books, I think that dynamic is also worth looking at. More and more, women are becoming visible and impossible to ignore in spaces that male fans and pop culture geeks considered their own,and the backlash against Twilight is heavily influenced by male privilege trying to keep fandom spaces centered around men and boys.

  12. More and more, women are becoming visible and impossible to ignore in spaces that male fans and pop culture geeks considered their own,and the backlash against Twilight is heavily influenced by male privilege trying to keep fandom spaces centered around men and boys.

    Yeah, I gave up on taking pot-shots at Twilight when it became the latest iteration of arguments that women are spoiling serious fandom. It’s an evergreen argument that I previously saw with Potter, manga, and slash.

  13. Thanks Roxie! I haven’t even read the books and am still incredibly intrigued just by browsing through that link.

    I took a course on race, gender & class in Disney movies and it was one of the best courses in my college career. I’d take a course on HP or the Beatles any day =)

  15. I can’t stand Twilight, but it would be really interesting to look at it from an academic point of view.

    Re: women in fandom, it’s stuff like Twilight that gets me all confused. I hate it when the alpha nerds try to tell me that a predominantly female fandom/contribution to fandom is less valid because it has so many icky girls, but if there has to be pop culture aimed just at young women I think we should demand something a damn sight better than Twilight. This is one of the reasons I’d be interested in doing a course like this, because I don’t have the knowledge to figure this out yet. It could come in handy not just for figuring out where I stand on Twilight but also for defending the Harry Potter fandom when it gets the same treatment just for having a lot of teenage girls involved.

  16. Wow, this professor really digs deep into the connections between Twilight and Mormonism! Very interesting!

  17. I’m a Buffy kinda gal, but I’d love this course.

    Astraea, I am a hardcore nerd-girl that has learnt that because two of my major fandoms are female-heavy, my nerd credentials will be questioned. Hate to see male privilege in a group with whom I self-identify. So, I pull out my days as a comic-book/scifi shop employee, then I ask them why they have such an issue w/ what I like. Almost invariably they mention the fans. That is when enlightenment hits. Then I do.

  18. Just a couple of weeks ago, I gave a paper on Twilight at the Midwest Popular Culture Association conference. And I wasn’t the only one — there were something like 20 odd papers given across the three days, all on different topics. I had some fears that the Twilight panel would be full of fan apologists, but there were plenty of interesting and critical interpretations of the books from academics who also self-identified as fans. I fully believe you can teach a semester long class on Twilight and its fandom that does not revolve around ‘OMG, Edward forever!’

    There’s certainly something to be said for studying a pop culture phenomena of this size. If nothing, then to answer ‘Why Twilight? Why now?’

  19. Am I the only one who loved to hate to love the books? I believe that media analysis is one of the cornerstones of the feminist movement. I also like vampire stories. It was a perfect match. I can talk to people who don’t identify as feminist about the multitude of problems with the books; many of the folks I talk to are initally surprised that Meyer is Mormon, but say that after they knew, they remembered all kinds of Mormon undertones. Teenagers and adults alike bring up the books when they’re being trained on abusive relationships. The series is a tool to open up larger discussions; they’re entertaining and have a lot of blatantly shitty messages.

    There was a course on Sex and the City at my university in 2004/2005. It got at least two women I know to take more Women’s Studies courses; they initially wanted to fulfill a general requirement and wound up loving the pop culture analysis.

    The media is one of the primary ways that misogyny is perpetuated. We can’t ignore it.

  20. Interesting, the course itself would be something I would be interested in studying, but what about other books? Do they have to be young adult fiction? I can see why the Twilight saga would be included, but the novel has that cliched vampire and human girl love, it’s all over history, obviously the author knows that people are going to like it because so many have before. I think that’s why it’s so popular.

  21. I’m a bit friendly towards this course because my intensive reading humanities course in college was an instructor-led, “Sexual Revolutions, the 20s, 60s, and 80s?” during which we geeked out over Madonna vs. Joplin vs. Mae West.

  23. Discussing Twilight as though it were a significant event or a meaningful book in a college lit. class is nothing more than sudo-intellectual masturbation. It’ll be a fun class, no doubt an easy A to keep your grade point up, but thats about it. Meyers and the people who marketed her book are probably laughing on their stacks of money right now.

  24. Haley I suggest taking a look at the link I posted earlier. It’s not “sudo-intellectual masturbation” at all. There’s actual substance and a lot to discuss when you consider sexism, religion, and & various privilege present in the books & films.

  25. I think people should discuss Twilight as a significant event- it’s a huge pop culture phenomenon which also has some really big problems. Why wouldn’t we want to talk about it when there are teenage girls talking about how romantic it is for a guy they barely know to watch them sleeping?

  26. I mostly have a problem with Twilight and Harry Potter studies in the sense that they are written to provoke a very narrow set of reactions in its audience. You can do Dan Brown studies as well, or L Ron Hubbard. *Anything* can be fascinating given a wide enough net–such as interpreting Twilight in it’s Mormon lenses and how the wider audience reacts to that. However, this is a function of *people* being interesting, and not really the books, such that Twilight</em and Harry Potter are a function of widespread cultural literacy, rather than any kind of deep interaction with a culture. This is basically a book review version of an auto-MMORPG phenomenon.

    I suppose this is the nature of the fragmentation of cultural relevancy. Once upon a time, fantasy works like Wizard of Oz or Tolkien’s stuff, or pretty much anything else that actually developed real characters and genuinely engaged the imagination as well as provided challenges to political and social mindsets. As people drifted into ever more distinct genres, the at-least-pretty-decent-and-accessible has faded from the wider social scene such that only the most shallow works can be talked about at all. The most inoffensive to the wider society. Then we talk about these work in terms of foibles and tendencies–and anyone who talks about them in the more critical sense gets the bandgeek-smoking-under-the-stands effect. You, that isn’t what I want. I don’t many other intellectual or people who wants more really desire to talk about this drek either–not in terms of the opportunity costs in talking about better works that has drifted beyond the immediate genre crowd. Plenty of people have read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and there’s far more meat of all kinds in that novel. It’s not actually so hard to offer courses in much more chewy but not so widely read materials. “So You’ve Read Harry Potter–Let’s do Daughter of Hounds” are probably out there as well. But this is a phenomenon of what is recognizable. Not too many people are familiar with C. Kiernan, so bloggers *rarely* pick up on courses like that. It was really cool with Racialicious did that article on the women werewolves paper.

    Twilight is simply a function of easy news aggregation.

  27. I don’t think that’s true, though. I don’t know about Twilight, but there are plenty of themes in Harry Potter that could be analyzed: gender, race (as wizards vs. muggles and us vs. them mentality), class, labor, war, terrorism, genocide, religion/faith, etc. Those books weren’t written purely for entertainment. JKR herself has explained how she drew on history and current events to inspire elements of the story and it’s clear to see that influence in those books if you’re reading them with a critical eye.

  28. Gembird: Why wouldn’t we want to talk about it when there are teenage girls talking about how romantic it is for a guy they barely know to watch them sleeping?  

    Never thought about this.

    Creepy creepy creepy.

    It’s not that I thought it was romantic, it just never registered as sexual predator until now.

    frau sally benz: race, gender & class in Disney movies

    This sounds amazing.

  29. frau sally benz: I don’t know about Twilight, but there are plenty of themes in Harry Potter that could be analyzed: gender, race (as wizards vs. muggles and us vs. them mentality), class, labor, war, terrorism, genocide, religion/faith, etc..  

    I’m actually trying to write about this at the moment- I just re-read the books for the first time since I really became politically aware and there are so many parallels to oppression in the real world that I can hardly keep track of them all. People tend to dismiss Harry Potter as being ‘just for kids’ but the last book in particular is really worth looking at for this stuff.

    Twilight has it too, but it has casual racism and misogyny instead of a lasting and clear message that these things are wrong.

  30. I don’t know why someone wouldn’t offer a course on Twilight, since there have been classes on the phenomenon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for years now, in many circles. It has been studied for the way it changed television, as part of Women’s Studies curriculum, as pop-culture analysis, as vampire lore, etc.

    The critical analysis of popular culture is an often scoffed at medium for reaching people that academia sometimes leaves behind. I think doubly so when it is something that is especially loved by a primarily female fanbase. Even though I am not a huge fan of the series, this is a class I would at least take to get involved in the discussion.

    I would LOVE to take a Harry Potter class.

  31. Twilight has it too, but it has casual racism and misogyny instead of a lasting and clear message that these things are wrong.

    Does a literary text (even one as errr…clunky as “Twilight”) need to offer such a “lasting and clear message”, in your opinion? Not a rhetorical question, on my part.

  32. Am I the only one who didn’t immediately think of the ever-annoying sham that calls itself the Twilight “Saga” each time I read the word ‘Twilight’. I love that word but Meyer turned it into something dirty.
    As for studying it and its impact well that’s fine and dandy as long as it sticks to truth (ie. its a horrible horrible role-model for young girls).

  33. My problem with Twilight is this:

    So the guy is hundreds of years old and has the time and leisure to become cultured and educated.

    Wouldn’t he be romantically interested in a human with a compelling and intriguing life past, instead of in a teenage girl with no defining personality attributes?

    I mean, a vampire who became obsessed with and stalked/fell in love with some 52-year old anthropologist, that would be an interesting story, wouldn’t it? She’s got all this shit going on, he’s got all this shit going on, it’s interesting shit and it all interacts in fascinating ways…maybe she studied a tribe that his vampire clan has a history with and he’s one of the myths she’s studying…

    Instead it’s creepy old perv drools about 16 year olds. A 40-year old who is sexually focused on young women (not even teenagers!) is considered emotionally immature at BEST. A 400-year old guy? Why isn’t he viewed as a pity-worthy sad sack?

    If I was a woman I’d be offended that I’m expected to think this is an interesting idea for a story, and that this emotional derelict is presented as something I’m supposed to lust over instead of something I should hold in cold contempt.

  34. Natalia:
    Does a literary text (even one as errr…clunky as “Twilight”) need to offer such a “lasting and clear message”, in your opinion? Not a rhetorical question, on my part.  

    Not necessarily, no, but I certainly don’t agree with Stephenie Meyer’s tendency to condone shitty actions by writing characters who behave badly and don’t see any consequences. Perhaps I’ve gone a little too far the other way- I don’t expect every book to have a big old moral lesson, but Meyer writes characters that we are supposed to see as perfect despite the fact that their behaviour is actually unacceptable. I guess it’s really as much about ‘how are we meant to read this?’ as it is about what we actually get from it.

  35. I am the professor that proposed, and is now teaching, this course. It grew out of my book, Seduced by Twilight, a feminist analysis of the saga and the phenomonen (forthcoming from McFarland in spring).
    To answer your question how quick it filled up, QUICK! It filled within hours of the schedule going live. The first day I had 15 trying to crash with more crashers following suit the first few weeks.
    While I feel you that courses on women and revolution are more to many feminists speed, I believe (as so many of the commenters have mentioned) that feminist critique of popular culture is crucial.
    The course is indeed strongly feminist in its methodology yet I aim not to “hate on” the books in a way that turns fans off – rather, I hope to make everyone, from the lover to the hater, think more critically about the texts and the cultural phenomenon they have spawned.
    I am getting great feedback from students – many of whom have written guest posts at my Twilight blog. Hope some of you will head on over to join the discussion. (http://seducedbytwilight.wordpress.com/)
    Next week we are covering race and white privilege, postcolonialism and cultural tourism, and the commodification of the Forks/the Quileute.
    Thanks again for generating discussion about the course!

  37. I think a lot of the “OMG the colleges are actually giving courses in pop culture the world is ending” reaction is due to the fact that people envision students watching/reading popular media in these classes and talking about it amongst themselves as if they were a group of friends watching TV and talking in someone’s living room. Learning how to do a close reading, how to critically examine a text, see it through a particular lens (class, power, gender, race, historical, economic, structural, etc), and analyze it using a specific set of critical thinking tools is a tough but powerful learning experience…if it is done right, the student will never be able to view popular media on a surface level ever again 🙂 They can take that new way of analyzing a topic and apply it more broadly, to other academic subjects and to other popular media. It’s like a semester’s worth of LASIK surgery on your critical thinking sight and the new ability to “see” beyond the surface is a little overwhelming sometimes (and I for one have sometimes wished I could “take off the glasses” and have a blissfully blurry day here and there).

    I’m a scientist but several of my family members teach English, writing, and literature and I understand this approach. It’s like using a “Roadrunner/Wiley Coyote physics” example to engage first-year students rather than starting with toiling through proofs of classic theorems. Using accessible culture as a tool, or as a “hook” to pique people’s curiosity and draw them in is the oldest teaching trick in the book (pun intended). You suck them in and then make them think…and that (in some students) is the beginning of a snowball effect that leads them to “higher literature”. No one is going to start out examining Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason…training wheels are ok.

  38. Not necessarily, no, but I certainly don’t agree with Stephenie Meyer’s tendency to condone shitty actions by writing characters who behave badly and don’t see any consequences. Perhaps I’ve gone a little too far the other way- I don’t expect every book to have a big old moral lesson, but Meyer writes characters that we are supposed to see as perfect despite the fact that their behaviour is actually unacceptable. I guess it’s really as much about ‘how are we meant to read this?’ as it is about what we actually get from it.

    I mostly agree with you in regards to Meyer (though I think her characters can be read in a variety of ways), though I generally don’t expect any clear moral messages from most books I read. But by books I mostly mean “books I consider good”. I think in an odd way, one can come to expect more in regards to morals from literature that’s somewhat subpar (according to standards of form, etc.).

    I think Meyer is worth looking at in all sorts of contexts. Hashing out what’s good, and what’s terrible, about these books is a worthy process. They fly off the shelves for all sorts of reasons, after all.

  39. I am an avid reader, and a bit of an experimentalist when it comes to literature. I will give anything a chance to impress me, even if it’s outside my normal tastes or has positive or negative media hype. I have much love for paranormal fiction, especially vampire novels. So, at my teenage siblings’ insistence, I read the first Twilight novel. I was vastly unimpressed. The thing that frustrated me the most is that this book butchered the iconic fantasy that is Vampire. It took the gritty, macabre brutality that makes the vampire archetype exciting and turned it into what amounts to a PG rated Dante’s Inferno. Now I’m not saying that a good vampire novel has to be as morbidly fantastical as say the works of Anne Rice. Consider the Morganville Vampire series by Rachel Caine. It is aimed at the same ‘Twilight’ demographic, offers surprising morality, but the protagonist is a down on her luck underdog turned heroine, not a sappy little damsel in distress, and the vampires are minus the angst and glitter. Most of those I know that consider themselves ‘twihards’ reluctantly agree that the Morganville series is actually much better, but because it lacks the popularity of Twilight, fans will stick to Team Edward for their proprietary pop social fix. I guess I just don’t prefer my vampires censored with glittery social pretenses.

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