Postgraduate Course: Film and Gender (CLLC11145)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Film and Gender examines the ways in which gender is constructed and performed across a range of moving image forms and genres. The course will introduce students to a wide range of theoretical frameworks and help them to develop analytical approaches responsive to moving image texts.
Teaching methods and assessment models are designed to work both for students with a background in film studies and gender studies; and for students without formal training in these fields who bring an interest in pursuing studies in gender and representation.
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| Course description |
The outline below offers an indication of course content. Weekly screening choices and, in some instances, workshop content are liable to vary year on year. This indicative outline provides an indicative sense of the course's coverage and its approach. Most importantly it makes evident the ways the course is structured to develop expertise in theory and analysis in Masters levels students who may come to this course without existing formal studies in film or in the analysis of gender and representation.
Week One: Representing Gender
Screenings From Bromances to Post-Feminist Chicks
This week's screenings are drawn from a range of contemporary popular culture texts which play with notions of gender and its on-screen performance.
30 Rock (Tina Fey, NBC 2012)
Girls (Lena Dunham, HBO 2012)
Flight of the Conchords (James Bobin, HBO 2010)
Peep Show (Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Channel 4 2012)
Workshop: Analysing Gender
This workshop will introduce students to the analysis of gender within media representations. Working with still images sourced by the students, we will consider how ideologies of masculinity and femininity are encoded and decoded. Students will then explore how the analysis of moving image representations might require expanded models of analysis.
Week Two: Theories of Gender
Screening Hairspray John Waters
Workshop
This seminar will examine key theories of gender, drawing on the range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary framings which have fed into film studies - including literary theory, art history, feminist theory, sociology, performance studies, queer studies and social psychology . It will explore tensions between different theories of gender - especially between essentialist approaches and models of gender as socially constructed and consider how these tensions play out in the analysis of the moving image, especially in the ways Waters' queer sensibility and excess disturb essentialist notions, as does the use of cross-gender casting.
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Week Three: Gender and Other Differences
Screening Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori)
Workshop
This week's workshop is built around the screening of Once Were Warriors . The film, an adaptation of the novel, made a significant and unusual impact in its native New Zealand, provoking a national debate around domestic violence and child abuse. Set within the indigenous Maori community the film offers one way of thinking about the intersections between gender and other kinds of identity: nationality, ethnicity and class.
Close analysis of this film will be used as a way to work out from ways of approaching cinema as centred on narrative and character function, to look at other ways that gender might be performed within a film text through mise-en-scene, sound and editing, and through the interplay between realist genres and melodrama.
Week Four: Gender and Genre
Screening Gilda (King Vidor, 1946)
Workshop
This week's workshop looks at how genre plays out in gendered forms. Using film noir as a case study, it will examine the ways in which characters function as anti-heroes and femmes fatales; narrative, soundtrack and mise-en-scene work to represent gender on-screen. Close analysis of the screening and focussed reading around film noir will build students' knowledge of the techniques of film analysis and of the language of film theory, before moving into the complex field of spectatorship studies.
Week Five: Spectatorship
Screening Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
Workshop
This week's seminar is centred around Laura Mulvey's foundational feminist intervention into film theory 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. It will explore the way in which Mulvey extended the apparatus theory developed from Metz and Baudry to expose and critique film theory's blindspots on gender. The seminar will include an introduction to the ideas drawn from psychoanalysis which proved so generative for theorising cinema and gender.
Week Six : Performing Masculinity
Screening Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
Workshop
This workshop explores the ways in which film performs masculinity through performance, body and gesture; and through multiple masquerade and fantasy. Using Steve Neale's seminal article, we'll examine the problematics of the male body being put on display, and the recourse to onscreen violence as a means to manage the anxieties provoked by male bodies being looked at. We will also consider how and why Fight Club has functions as a film that holds special resonance for critics and for broader audiences, moving beyond textual analysis to address questions of reception and mediation.
Week Seven: Alternative Models of Spectatorship
Screening Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
Workshop
Theories of Spectatorship II opens up alternative approaches to moving image spectatorship, moving through Mary Ann Doane's adoption of masquerade theory to propose a model of cross-gender spectatorship; through the uses and abuses of fantasy theory to considering what more recent thinking on haptic cinema, digital culture and embodiment might have to offer the framing of gender across different screens.
Week Eight: Queer Theories
Screening: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
Workshop
This week's workshop explores key theorists and ideas in the evolution of queer theory. In addition to the selected film,
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the workshop will also consider queer readings of other films studied over the course.
Week Nine: Hearing Gender
Screening: 10 (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2002)
Workshop
Much film theory is built around metaphors of vision; and this tendency has been ever more strongly pronounced in work on gender and spectatorship which has predominantly focussed on notions of scopophilia and sight. Sound has been generally neglected in the study of gender and representation. This workshop will open up the consideration of sound as a critical space, focussing on Kiarostomi's film 10 a film which plays with what can and cannot be said and heard.
Weeks Ten and Eleven: Student Presentations
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | Students on LLC MSc programmes get first priority to this course. If you are not on an LLC programme, please let your administrator or the course administrator know you are interested in the course. Unauthorised enrolments will be removed. No auditors are permitted. |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrating a critical understanding of key theories of gender and identity
- show familiarity with different modes of film analysis
- offer an informed understanding of significant critical debates in film studies
- interpret the representation of gender and sexuality across a diverse range of moving image texts
- undertake informed analysis through discussion, presentation and written work
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Reading List
Critical research on gender and representation is extensive and spans a range of disciplines. The weekly required reading will take you through the most significant contributions in the development of film theory; gender, representation and the moving image. There is supplementary reading indicated for most week¿s themes. You are encouraged to build your own bibliography through independent research for your final assignment and course tutors will be happy to advise further on this.
Many key weekly readings are drawn from Sue Thornham¿s edited reader which is recommended for purchase on this course. Other required weekly readings have online links indicated below.
Recommended Reader
Sue Thornham (1999) Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Week One: Representing Gender
Readings
John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing London: BBC and Penguin Books
Ways of Seeing (BBC, 1972) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GI8mNU5Sg
Stuart Hall ([1973] 1980): 'Encoding/decoding'. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.): Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 London: Hutchinson, pp. 128-38.
Available online at:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/sh-coding.pdf
See also Daniel Chandler¿s Semiotics for Beginners at
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem08c.html
Background Readings
John Alberti (2013)¿ ¿I Love You, Man¿: Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of the Romantic Comedy,¿ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 30:2, 159-172
Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2011.575658
Karen Boyle & Susan Berridge (2012): I Love You, Man, Feminist Media Studies,
2012 Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.740494
Angela McRobbie (2009) ¿Illegible Rage: Post-Feminist Disorders¿ in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change London; Sage.
Angela McRobbie (2004): Post¿feminism and popular culture, Feminist Media Studies, 4:3, 255-264
Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077042000309937
Gill, R. (2007) ¿Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility¿, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2): 147-166.
Available online at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2449/1/Postfeminist_media_culture_%28LSERO%29.pdf
Week 2: Theories of Gender
Readings
Linda Alcoff (1988) ¿Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory¿ in Signs 13 (Spring, 1988): 405-436.
Available online at: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/stable/pdfplus/3174166.pdf
Judith Butler (1988) ¿Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory¿ in Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988) pp. 519-531Available online at; http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/stable/pdfplus/3207893.pdf?acceptTC=true
West, C., and Zimmerman, D. H (1990) ¿Doing Gender¿ in The Social Construction of Gender eds Lorber, Judith and Farrell, Susan. London: Sage.
Available online at: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/clar0514/academic/west%20and%20zimmerman.pdf
Week Three: Gender and Other Differences
Readings
Peggy McIntosh (1988) ¿White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack¿
http://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversity/resources/white-privilege.pdf
Cornelius Martin Renes (2011)¿ Once Were Warriors, but how about Maoritanga now? Novel and film as third space¿ in miscelanea 44
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&ved=0CFMQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.miscelaneajournal.net%2Findex.php%2Fmisc%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F67%2F38&ei=81dQUdSmKorcPb-rgcAD&usg=AFQjCNHeuokFTOwkX0wXj3PZcUMKXcsnLA
Week Four: Gender and Genre
Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009)
¿ Emma Whiting, ¿Dangerous Women and the Abject in the Noir Thriller¿, Crimeculture, 2005
Additional Readings
¿ Julianne Pidduck, The ¿fatal femme¿ in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993
¿ Deborah Walker, ¿Re-reading the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: an evolutionary perspective¿, The Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, No. 6
Week Five: Spectatorship
Laura Mulvey (1975) ¿Visual pleasure and narrative cinema¿ in Screen 16:3
And collected in Thornham pp58-69
Laura Mulvey (1981) ¿Afterthoughts on ¿Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema¿ in Thornham, pp122 -130
Additional Reading
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener ¿Cinema as eye : look and gaze¿ Chapter 4 in Film Theory: an introduction through the senses, London: Routledge, 2010, pp 82 -107
E-resource in UoE Library
http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/EBookView/S9780203876879/S91?state:reader/protected/AbstractView=ZH4sIAAAAAAAAAFvzloG1XJiBgYGJkYG1JLMkJ5WBNTWzOCmvhIHX0tzCwMjA2MLczMLcspyDAYcMAHM%2BbVZDAAAA
Teresa de Lauretis (1984) ¿Oedipus Interruptus¿ in Alice Doesn¿t: Feminsim, Semiotics, Cinema. London: MacMillan; and in Thornham pp 83-96
Week Six : Performing Masculinity
Readings
Dyer, Richard (1997) ¿The Matter of Whiteness¿, in White: Essays on Race and Culture New York and London: Routledge, pp. 1-40
Neale, Steve (1993) ¿Masculinity as Spectacle¿ in Cohan, Steven, and Hark, Ina Rae (eds.) Screening the Male London: Routledge, pp. 9 ¿ 20.
Kaja Silverman(1992) ¿The Dominant Fiction¿ in Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London:Routledge. 15-51.
Additional Readings
Holmlund, Chris (1993) ¿Masculinity as Multiple Masquerades¿ in Cohan, Steven, and Hark, Ina Rae (eds.) Screening the Male London: Routledge
Claire Sisco King (2009): It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject
Hegemony, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6:4, 366-385
Available online at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420903335135
Slade, Andrew ¿To Live Like Fighting Cocks: Fight Club and the Ethics of
Masculinity, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28:3, 230-238
Available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/10509200802640988 and
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509200802640988
Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
Week Seven: Alternative Models of Spectatorship
Mary Ann Doane (1982) ¿Film and the Masquerade: theorising the female spectator¿ in Screen 23: 3; and collected in Thornham pp131-145
hooks, bell. ¿The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.¿ The feminism and visual culture reader. Amelia Jones, ed. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 94-105.
Joan Riviere ¿Womanliness as Masquerade¿ collected in Formations of Fantasy, eds
Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, Methuen: London, 1986 (1929), pp 35 -44
Online links:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38635989/Riviere-Joan-Womanliness-as-Masquerade-International-Journal-of-Psychoanalysis-Vol-10-1929-303-13
or
http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/DadaSurrealism/DadaSurrReadings/RiviereMask.pdf
Charles Soukup (2009): Techno-Scopophilia: The Semiotics of Technological Pleasure in Film, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26:1, 19-35
Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295030802684026
Valerie Walkerdine (1986) ¿Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy¿ in Burgin et al eds. Formations of Fantasy, London; Routledge and collected in Thornham, pp 180-195
Week Eight: Queer Theories
Readings
Judith Butler, (1993 )¿Critically Queer¿ in Bodies That Matter . New York and London: Routledge, 223-242
Richard Dyer (2003) Now You See It: studies on lesbian and gay film 2nd edition with Julianne Pidduck. London: Routledge.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990)¿Axioviatic¿ from The Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press. Also collected in The Cultural Studies Reader ed Simon During, Routledge, 1993 and available online: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/cocu108/data/texts/sedgaxio.pdf
Additional Readings
Aaron, Michele (2004)¿New Queer Cinema: An Introduction¿ in New Queer Cinema: A
6-7:35 pm Critical Reader. Ed. Michele Aaron. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 3-14.
Doty, Alexander(2000) ¿There¿s Something Queer Here¿ in The Film Studies Reader, J. Hollows, P. Hutchings & Mark Jancovich, eds. London: Edward Arnold
Week Nine: Hearing Gender
Readings
Judith Halberstam (2007) ¿Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy¿ in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 11 (2007) 51-58
Available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/journals/women_and_music/v011/11.1halberstam.html
Judith A. Peraino (2007) ¿Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam¿ inWomen and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 11 (2007) 59-64
Available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/journals/women_and_music/v011/11.1peraino.html
Kaja Silverman The Acoustic Mirror: the female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press
Available online at: http://home.comcast.net/~ciaranbrennan/books/The_Acoustic_Mirror.pdf
Additional Readings
Alex Munt ¿Digital Kiarostami and the Open Screenplay¿ in Scan
http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=74
Hamid Naficy (1994) ¿Veiled Vision/ Powerful Presences: women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema¿ in The Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran Afkhami and Friedl eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Available online at:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zaoSrvt-pCQC&pg=PA131&dq=hamid+naficy+veiled+vision&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OLlQUavhAoO_O8L4gQg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=hamid%20naficy%20veiled%20vision&f=false
Anahid Kassabian (2001)¿Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. London: Routledge. Excerpts online at:
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS114/readings/Kassabian-1.pdf
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Critical thinking
Ability to analyse different kinds of texts: critical, popular, literary, filmic, televisual, still images.
Research skills
Group work skills
Oral presentation skills
Ability to construct and organise complex arguments in written assignments, in public presentations, and in small group work.
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| Keywords | FaG |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Leanne Dawson
Tel: (0131 6)50 3644
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: |
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