CMCL-C 334: Current Topics in Communication and Culture
(Topic: Community-based Media Production of the 4th Annual
Bloomington PRIDE Film Festival)
Class Number: 22982

MW, 2:30 PM-3:45 PM, Location: TBA

Requires authorization from the instructor.  Students must speak
with or e-mail the instructor to obtain permission to enroll in the
class.  Enrollment is limited to 12 students.

Note: This is a new service-learning course that has not yet been
assigned a course number of its own—once the course has been
assigned a unique course number, students who enroll in this section
of C334 will automatically be switched to the new course.  The
course will definitely be assigned a 300-level course number, so you
WILL earn 300-level credit for this class.   Students who earned
CMCL credit for this project during fall 2005 will not be able to
earn credit for it again.

Instructor: Mary L. Gray
E-Mail: mLg@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 214
Phone: 855-4379

Want to see the process behind putting together an international
film festival?  Interested in filmmaking and/or gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender culture?  Planning on a career in event
planning, marketing, sales, or arts administration?  Here is your
chance to gain hands-on experience in these fields while working
with media and film scholars, community members from diverse
backgrounds, and the professional staff of the Buskirk-Chumley
Theater (BCT). Students will attend monthly planning meetings of the
4th Annual Bloomington PRIDE Film Festival Steering Committee and
work closely with one of five different work groups – Film
Selection, Marketing, Fund Development, Additional Performance &
Venues, and Party Planning. Students will accomplish tasks as varied
as compiling a database of the films submitted to the festival,
gathering advertising quotes from various sources, investigating
partnership opportunities with other performance and social venues,
organizing other volunteers, and decorating the theater for the
opening party. Alongside the hands-on experience of developing a
community-based cultural production, students will reflect on the
cultural meanings, rhetorical strategies, and political economy of
representation, identity, and community communicative practice.

This seminar and workgroup-based course examines the contemporary
concerns and promise of what has been dubbed “new queer cinema.”
Specifically we will take up how (if?) new queer cinema offers
something different from mainstream representations of LGBT or queer
subjectivities which have served as key, U.S. popular culture sites
for the circulation of gender and sexual norms from the turn of the
20th Century to the present. Drawing on critical media and cultural
studies approaches, students will learn to comparatively read the
historical texts of popular films against the grain of more
contemporary, independently produced queer cinema as presented at
the Bloomington PRIDE Film Festival and as investigated in groups
and independently through course assignments. Through a seminar-
formatted discussion, we will examine the logics of the gaze, the
pleasure and danger in looking, and the relationships between
various social categories of identity (most notably race and class)
and the visibility of queer representations. Assignments may
include: 10 hours per week minimum of on-site community service, 40-
50 pages of scholarly reading per week, 2 ½ hours of lecture per
week, short reading response papers, and a term research paper (7-10
pages in length) based on the student’s service experience and
engaging arguments from the class readings.

•Because this is a 300-level service-learning course, it will
provide a focused interrogation of current scholarship in the field
and hands-on experiences applying concepts discussed.

•Course will be a mixture of seminar discussion, and required,
weekly participation in service with community partners; attendance
will be taken daily and count towards final course evaluation.

•Authors studied will include Richard Barrios, Harry Benshoff,
Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Sean Griffin, Lisa Henderson, Judith
Halberstam, B. Ruby Rich, and Vito Russo.

•Continues themes and ideas presented in C205: Introduction to
Communication and Culture and C203: Gender, Sexuality, and the Media.

•Designed to improve students’ abilities to critically examine the
representation of communities and the meaning of community-based
cultural production.

•Assignments will include written reading summaries, a group
presentation and associated paper approximately 3-5 pages in length,
and a final paper approximately 7-10 pages in length.