This course will introduce students to the history of “queer”
representations of sexuality and gender as they are entwined and
encoded in popular cinema in the United States. We will examine how
constructs of queer behavior and body type are later transformed
into modern notions of naturalized identity. We will also
interrogate commonly held and frequently unquestioned assumptions
about race, class, nationality, and ability that are associated with
queer representations. Students will carefully study the traces of
gender and sexual norms as they have been constructed in the arch of
mainstream U.S. cinema from the turn of the Twentieth Century to the
present. Using the lens of critical media and cultural studies
approaches, students will learn to read select examples from this
history towards understanding the broader political economies and
cultural contexts that shaped contemporary understandings of
sexuality and gender. Students will also learn to analyze how past
political and economic inequalities in the culture industries might
structure our current sense of what it means to be a sexual and
gendered person, especially what it means to be “normal”
and/or “queer”.