ARH530

Cinema has a privileged relationship with sexuality -- fantasy and desire shape how we watch film. Starting with Edison's Dickinson Experimental Sound Film (1895), a film of two men waltzing, the course examines how film has been shaped by queer fantasies, identities, and sexualities. For instance, by rigorously re-working cinematic conventions -- non-narrative, abstraction, discontinuity, and foregrounding of the film apparatus -- experimental film resonates and echoes queer theory's commitments to dis-identification, non-normativity, deconstruction, and other anti-social principles. In this course, we will reflect on the following questions, and more: What constitutes queer film, queer characters, and queer dis/pleasures? How might we define, or conceptualize, a queer aesthetics? How is spectatorship shaped by sexuality, and how does queerness alter this relationship? Is there a cost to LGBTQ visibility through cinema, and if so, what is it? How is queerness made un/legible through gender, race, sexuality, and nation, and ability? Is film inherently queer?

Graduate-level requirements include additional readings and teaching or co-teaching one class meeting. Teaching will include preparing a lecture or class discussion concerning pre-screened films and assigned readings.