W, 4:00 PM-6:30 PM, C2 272

Open to Graduates Only!

Instructor: Alex Doty
E-Mail: alexdoty@indiana.edu
Office: C2 251
Phone: 856-4928

This course explores the intersection of sex, gender and sexuality,
film theory and criticism, and director Alfred Hitchcock and his
films.  Contemporary film scholarship, sexual politics, and
Hitchcock films have been a consistent and compelling threesome.
While not the earliest reading of Hitchcock through the lens of
sexual politics,  Laura Mulvey’s 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” has certainly had the greatest impact on film scholarship,
as it laid the groundwork for feminist psychoanalytic film theory
(or theories), with reference to Rear Window, Vertigo, and Marnie.
Responses to Mulvey’s essay often seek to modify her work through re-
readings of these, and other, Hitchcock films. Even biographers were
influenced by feminist critiques of the director’s work, as attested
to by the psychosexual bent of Donald Spoto’s controversial
bestseller The Dark Side of Genius.  Post-Mulvey and post-Spoto in
its interests, Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much
discusses both the director and selected films from Blackmail (1929)
to Frenzy (1971).  Then, in 1989, and again in 2002, Robin Wood
returns to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films and adds new chapters
that combine feminist  and gay approaches. But perhaps the seminal
piece of gay criticism on Hitchcock is John Hepworth’s “Hitchcock’s
Homophobia,” which appeared in Christopher Street in 1982.  In
contrast to feminist film theory and criticism, it was a number of
years before film scholars felt they could work on Hitchcock and
homosexuality.  Since the 1990s, however, Hitchcock and his films
have proven invaluable in the development of gay, lesbian, and queer
film theory and criticism. Besides the works mentioned above, this
course will discuss a number of other important pieces of film
theory and criticism that view Hitchcock and his films in relation
to sexual politics.  The course also requires a weekly film viewing,
two short essays, one class presentation, and one longer final
paper.