News: Seriously??? American College Offers Course On Miley Cyrus

Skidmore College is offering a course called “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media.” Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chernoff will teach the class at the private liberal arts school located in Saratoga Springs, New York. According to the course description; “From Disney tween to twerking machine, Miley Cyrus has grown up in the public eye, trying on and discarding very different identities onscreen and off. She provides rich examples for analyzing aspects of intersectional identities and media representation.”
Some of those examples include: “Uses of culture across race, class, and gender,” “Bisexuality, queerness, and the female body,” “The Rise of the Disney Princess,” and “Gender stratification and the hyper-commodification of childhood.”
Chernoff told the Daily Gazette; “I created it as a creative and rigorous way of looking at what’s relevant about sociology and sociology theory. Miley Cyrus is a surprisingly complicated cultural moment.” Chernoff watched the fallout from Miley’s infamous performance with Robin Thicke at the MTV VMAs and decided there was much to be learned from her behavior. Chernoff said students enrolling in her class should have at least an introductory background in sociology and be prepared to write, since there are no multiple choice exams in the class.

Miley isn’t the first celebrity to get studied in college. Beyoncé is the subject of a course at Rutgers University called “Politicizing Beyoncé,” which uses the pop star’s music and career to “explore American race, gender and sexual politics.” Professor Chernoff told ABC News her course will be much different; “Unfortunately, the way we talk about female pop stars and female bodies, class matters, gender matters, sexuality and sexual performance matters, but race matters a lot [too] and the way we talk about white pop stars is quite different than how we talk about the bodies of women of color. Cyrus complicates representations of the female body in pop culture in some ways that are good, bad, and ugly.”