On the other hand, I’ve been teaching long enough to know what works in my classroom: what my strengths and weaknesses are, and how best to play to/compensate for them. I’ve become more forthright about interrogating certain identity categories — race, gender, class, and sexual orientation among them — on an ongoing basis as part of our overall exploration of a subject, and am fairly confident that students emerge from my classes with their own subject positions troubled and broadened. Too, I find that it’s incorrect, and sometimes counterproductive, to assume that all students (even Swatties!) come into the room at equal levels of proficiency and readiness to tackle questions that arrow so precisely into the personal and political. One of my guiding pedagogical principles is to keep as many people as possible engaged in the conversation, denying them excuses to switch off; this sometimes means being less confrontational about hot-button issues than my own committedly liberal politics would dictate.

Short answer: in my experience, devoting a week to identity doesn’t take the topic off the table at other points in the semester; if anything, it helps put us all on the same page by establishing a vocabulary we can use as we navigate things like genre. For the TV/NM class in particular, the readings we’re working with do a good job of keeping those questions alive and important no matter what the week’s focus.

I wonder how you’ve handled, in structuring the syllabus, the question of the “race week” (or the “gender” week, or “queer” week, etc). In thinking about how, in the future, I’ll develop courses of my own, I’m always troubled by the possibility of dumping the identity stuff into a single week, for fear of ghettoizing it within the structure of the course.

It seems like a lot of weeks in this course — particularly the genre-centric weeks in the second half of the course — could support topic-relevant identity-centric readings (e.g. Katherine Sender’s “Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project” or something from Sender and Kraidy’s edited volume, The Politics of Reality TV). What do you think are the potential problems/benefits of having an explicitly identified “Race/Ethnicity/Identity” week?