Class Schedule

9/17: Introduction: 1920s & 30s, the “New Woman,” Urban Space, and New Media Audiences

 

Screening: Stella Dallas (King Vidor, US, 1937)

 

 

9/24: 1940s Ships & Sailors, “Rosie the Riveter,” Stars as Exports, & the Zoot Suit Riots

  • Jane Marcellus, “Bo’s’n’s Whistle: Representing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ on the Job”
  • James Mandrell, “Carmen Miranda Betwixt and Between, or, Neither Here nor There.”
  • Eduardo Obregón Pagán, “Los Angeles, Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943”
  • Ara Osterweill, “America Year Zero”

Primary texts:

  • Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics” (weekly column), Los Angeles Times, 8 June 1941
  • Washington Post “Zoot Suit Riot” article collection.

 

Screening: The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, US, 1943)

Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, US, 1947)

 

 

10/1: 1950s-60s Suburbia, Motherhood, Housewifery, & The Pill

  • Lynn Spigel, “Television and the Family Circle”
  • Laura Briggs, “Demon Mothers in the Social Laboratory: Development, Overpopulation, and ‘The Pill””
  • Janice Radway, “Women Read the Romance”

Primary texts:

 

Screening: Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, US, 1956); Maya Deren experimental short: DVD, 15 min.; Matthias Mueller, Home Stories.

 

 

10/8: 1950s-60s Urban Living, Bachelor Pads, & Aspirational Media

  • Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “‘We Like Our Apartment’: The Playboy Indoors”
  • Laurie Ouellette, “Inventing the Cosmo Girl”
  • David Johnson, “Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture”

Primary texts:

 

Screening: Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, US, 1959)

 

 

10/15: Close Reading Session: Laura Mulvey & Alfred Hitchcock

  • Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterward”
  • Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sexual Difference (Part 1)” [do your best, I don’t expect that the psychoanalytic theory will make sense on the first (or fourth) reading]

 

Screening: The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1963)

Initial project pitch due

 

 

10/22: 1960s-70s: Sexual Revolutions, Collective Practice, & Strategies from the Underground

  • Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic”
  • Jessi Gan, “‘Still at the Back of the Bus’: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle”
  • Margaret Galvan, “Feminism Underground: The Comics Rhetoric of Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory”
  • Pat Aufderheide and Debra Zimmerman, “A to Z: A Conversation on Women’s Filmmaking”

Primary text

  • Wimmin’s Comix excerpts

 

Screening: Alternative Distribution I (the 1970s): Newsreels, Activist Media, and Experimental Feminist Films

  • Janie’s Janie (1971, 25 min) DVD
  • Inside Women Inside (1978, 28 min) DVD
  • Julie Dash, Four Women (1979, 4 min) DVD
  • The Woman’s Film (1971, 40 min) – DVD
  • Barbara McCollugh Water Ritual (6 min) DVD

 

10/29: Close Analysis due Monday, via email, by 11:59pm.

11/1 (Thursday): Minimum of 1 reading response posts due by 11:59pm.

 

 

11/5: 1970–1980s-Afro-Futurism, Imagining Radical Feminisms

  • bell hooks, “Visionary Feminism”
  • Lucas Hilderbrand, “In the Heat of the Moment: Notes on the Past, Present, and Future of Born in Flames”
  • Mitchell, Logue & Berry, “Are You Burning?”
  • Interview with Lizzie Borden, BOMB Magazine

Primary texts:

  • Octavia Butler, “Blood Child”
  • Samuel Delany, “Among the Blobs”
  • Mark Dery interviews on Afrofuturism

 

Screening: Born In Flames (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983)

 

 

11/12: Alternative Distribution II (the 1990s): Experimental and Activist Work on Film and Video

  • “The AIDS Crisis is Not Over,” conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky
  • Women, AIDS, and Activism, ACT UP Women and AIDS Book Group, excerpts
  • Douglas Crimp, “Right on, Girlfriend!”
  • Marlon Riggs, “Notes of a Signifyin’ Snap Queen” & Ron Gregg review of Tongues Untied
  • Alexandra Juhasz, “Forgetting ACT UP”

Primary texts:

Project Proposal Due in class.

 

Screening: works by Marlon Riggs, ACT-UP, Cheryl Dunye, and more.

 

 

11/19: Community Activism & the VHS Archives: A Workshop/Screening with Alexandra Juhasz

Workshop with visiting scholar/artist. Readings and Screenings TBA.

 

 

 

 

11/26: Close Analysis II: Pariah

 

Screening: Pariah (Dee Rees, US, 2011) DVD, 1hr 26min.

Minimum of 2 reading response posts due by 11:59pm.

 

 

12/3: Gender and the Colonial Gaze

  • Giovanni Marchini Camia, “It’s Not Literary Adaptation… It’s Literary Infection An Interview with Lucrecia Martel”
  • Gerd Gemünden and Silvia Spitta, “’I Was Never Afraid’: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel”
  • Trinh T. Minh-ha, excerpt from Woman, Native, Other

 

Screening: Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2017)

Project Report due in class.

 

 

12/10: Reassessing the Negative Image: A screening/workshop on Love and Hip Hop, Dirty Computers, and Experimental Digital Media

 

Screening: Workshop on contemporary reality TV, long-form music videos, and experimental film

 

 

12/21: All 3 reading response posts due by 11:59pm.

 

 

1/25: Final Projects must be posted by 11:59pm.