Susana Loza is an associate professor of critical race, gender and media studies at Hampshire College. She received B.A. degrees in political science and psychology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
She teaches cultural studies, critical race theory, film and media studies, popular music, feminist theory, and ethnic studies. Her research interests include the social construction of race and sex in speculative media; power, privilege, and cultural appropriation; gender and ethnic performativity in digital spaces; the politics of sampling and remixing; colonial cosplay in steampunk; the activist potential of social media; and the post-racial turn in popular culture.
Professor Loza’s publications include “Imperial Fictions: Doctor Who, Post-Racial Slavery, and Other Liberal Humanist Fantasies,” “Steampunk Style and the After-Life of Empire,” “Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture,” “Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times,” “Samples of the Past: Performative Nostalgia, Illicit Sounds, and Cultural Transformation in Latin House Music,” “Sampling (Hetero)sexuality: Diva-ness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music,” “Vampires, Queers, and Other Monsters: Against the Homonormativity of True Blood,” and “Orientalism and Film Noir: Subjective Sins and Othered Desires.” Her current project, Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Post-Racial Times (Lexington Books, Forthcoming 2016), explores the resurgence of racial masquerade in science fiction, horror, and fantasy and contemplates the fundamental, albeit changing, role that ethnic simulation plays in American and British cultures in a putatively post-racial and post-colonial era.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
- Settler Mythologies, Imperial Ideologies: Colonialism & Popular Culture
Historically, settler states and imperial regimes have disenfranchised and dispossessed racialized Others by constructing ideological frameworks that justify and obscure the ongoing violence of the colonial process. Through a close examination of film, television, music, and digital media, this course will explore how contemporary US popular culture fabricates and disseminates imperialist fantasies and settler mythologies. It will interrogate the political meanings embedded in popular culture and ask: What do imperial productions and settler creations reveal about the tangled relationships between race, history, and desire? How do colonial and imperial settings propagate racism, sexism and ableism; anxieties about class, gender, and sexuality; and concerns about the white (settler) colonial state's ability to digest and domesticate non-normative Others? What are the material consequences of romanticizing imperialism and settler colonialism? Can cultural industries rooted in racial and sexual conquest be decolonized? How does one disrupt and subvert the white (settler) colonial gaze?
- Raced Beats: Power, Politics, and Popular Music
Is music raced? How do musical sound, image, performance, and even performer become racialized? How does music speak to, reflect, reproduce, reinforce, and/or contest race and racism? How do individuals use music to express their ethnic/racial identity? Such questions hint at the undeniable yet ineffable influence of race on the American musical imagination. This seminar will consider the fraught intersection of race, power, and desire in contemporary popular music (hip hop, electronic dance music, rock, pop, punk, R&B/soul, world music, etc.). Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Popular Music Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Critical Race Studies, Ethnic Studies, Literary Criticism, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and (Ethno)Musicology, we will investigate the local creation and global circulation of racially-coded sonic signifiers; questions of authenticity and appropriation; music as a form of cultural resistance and colonial domination; and music as a key component in identity formation. This course is reading-, writing-, and theory-intensive.
- Digital Resistance: An Introduction to Media Studies and Production
This introductory seminar on media analysis and production will consider how constructions of power are embodied in technologies and conversely, how technologies shape our notions of authority and how we actively mobilize against it. In recent years, access to information and images has shifted dramatically. PDAs/Handheld technologies, social media networks, live web-streaming, video games, and podcasts eclipse mass-media broadcast channels distributing entertainment, news, and information. Drawing upon Media Arts, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Studies, we will examine models of Digital Resistance like Citizen Journalism, Community Access, Artivism, Hacktivism, and Digital Movements like BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, Arab Spring, and IdleNoMore in order to understand: precursors to contemporary innovations; Corporate Media and Government gatekeeping of information; modes of production; the relationship between media, information and action. Through readings, responses, visual projects, and research essays, students will learn to critically read and make digital media and contend with it as a mass language.
- Deviant Bodies: The Regulation of Race, Sex, and Disability in the US
Since its founding, the US has closely regulated the bodies of Others and punished those that rebel against these socially-constructed designations. Utilizing an interdisciplinary amalgam of Critical Race Theory, Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Media Studies, Sociology, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Feminist Theory, this course will explore how the state, the media, and civilian institutions police the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality by pathologizing, criminalizing, and stigmatizing difference. We will also examine how the subjects burdened with these dangerous inscriptions evade and contest them through passing, performativity, and other forms of identity-based resistance. Special attention will be paid to the criminalization of cross-racial and same sex desire; the re-biologization of racial and sexual difference; the dehumanization of immigrants; the racialization of crime; the gendering of mental disorder; the rise of homonormativity; genetic surveillance; the biopolitics of reproduction; and the role of The Law in constructing and controlling deviant bodies.
