Miley Cyrus has officially began her conquest of eternal limelight. Not only does she thrive in media’s glare of publicity, Cyrus will now be the topic of intellectual discussion, papers and exams.
Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. is now offering a course called “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media.” Led by Assistant Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chernoff, this course will examine “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.”
Whether you are the ultimate twerking fanatic or not, the course description itself is sure to grab your attention: “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.”
Chernoff began fabricating the idea of this course alongside the aftermath of Cyrus’ MTV Video Music Awards performance with singer Robin Thicke. Though Cyrus is not the first star to be analyzed in a college setting, Chernoff promised ABC News that her course would 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 matter 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,” she mentioned. “[Miley] complicates representation of the female body in pop culture in some ways that are good, bad, and ugly.”
Cyrus has been the talk of discussion for months now, and appears to only be thriving within the buzz. It seems as though she can’t stop, and she won’t stop.