Skidmore College touts new course — on Miley Cyrus and bisexuality

Come to Skidmore. Study Miley Cyrus. The Saratoga Springs, N.Y., college is offering a new course aimed at bolstering summer class attendance: “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media,” complete with studies of her shocking shaking at the music awards and discussion of female bisexuality.

Kicking off the course will be her now-famous VMA performance — the “tweak heard ’round the world,” said Carolyn Chernoff, visiting assistant professor of sociology, to the Saratogian.

“I was teaching a course called ’Youth Culture’ in and out of school, and the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards became the tweak heard ’round the world,” she said. “I showed that video to my class, and the students had so much to say.”

So Ms. Chernoff is capitalizing on that interest with a special course on Ms. Cyrus, using the pop star “as a lens through which to explore sociological thinking about identity, entertainment, media and fame,” she said, United Press International reported.

And among the themes to be discussed: The “rise of the Disney princess”; a section on “allies and appropriation”; and a third on “bisexuality, queerness and the female body,” UPI reported.

Ms. Chernoff said to ABC News: “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, and the way we talk about white pop stars is quite different than how we talk about the bodies of women of color. [Ms. Cyrus] complicates representations of the female body in pop culture in some ways that are good, bad and ugly.”