2023-2024 Academic Catalog

Jul 27, 2024

2023-2024 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

SCRN 288 - Gender and Film

This course will explore how film has participated in the construction, deconstruction, and transformation of gender. Building on students’ existing knowledge of early feminist film theory, which argued that Hollywood regularly constructs women as “Woman” through its myths, signs, and appeal to “the male gaze,” we will study how cinema has solicited women’s desires, even when not necessarily representing them on screen. And we will study the contributions of women, queer, trans, and BIPOC filmmakers and spectators to the critical interrogation and reimagination of gender through cinema. Across the semester, the relationship between text and context will be paramount to our studies. We will look to key films in feminist, queer, and trans film history and read interviews and autobiographical writings of feminist, queer, and trans directors and screen performers. More often than not, our focus will be the scholarship contextualizing and theorizing these films, including scholarship in queer and transgender studies.

Prerequisites: SCRN 101 or MCA 101 or permission

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year