Playboy, Play, and Leisure, 3 cr

This course focuses on the role of the Playboy brand in cultivating normative notions of femininity and masculinity and class mobility that are performed through the conspicuous consumption of leisure and domestic technologies. Approaching the brands’ flagship magazine as an archive, the course will examine the seventy-year history of Playboy through case studies of Backgammon, Pinball, Billiards/Snooker, Videogames, and Casino Gambling. The course will foreground critical visual methodologies a combine them with text-based analysis.