WGSS 315 - Comparative (Neo/Post) Modernities

This course explores a variety of critical approaches to the representation of gender and sexuality in film and video, including psychoanalytic feminist film theory and criticism, queer theory, narrative analysis, genre, visual culture, and cultural studies of gender and sexuality in relation to race, nation, and class. How have social constructs about gender and sexuality been promulgated and/or contested in film and video within mainstream and avant-garde contexts of cultural production? How have these constructs functioned to uphold and/or challenge other forms of social stratification or privilege? And, how might the woman’s body in particular—both as a sight to behold and a site of looking—offer different ways of thinking representational possibility? In asking these questions, the course considers a wide range of issues, including the gaze, the body, media technologies, spectatorship, identity and identification, realism, mythology, and pornography. Written work emphasizes the close analysis of film texts. Alternate years. Prerequisite(s): junior standing or permission of instructor, and at least one intermediate-level WGSS core course. (4 Credits)