CIN3103H: Queer Girls and Racial Others

The title words of this film-centered seminar index the interventions, encounters, and deployments the course hopes to stage. "Queer" and "Girls" situate our film screenings and readings within the contact zones of queer, feminist, and trans studies; shift the focus away from the gay male subjectivity that dominated New Queer Cinema; put gender and gender nonconformity on the radar; and displace traditional feminist film theory through a focus on youth, generationality, the masculinity of tomboys, and the girliness of women, trans, and cis. "Racial Others" signals a commitment to women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and the global reach of work on multicultural minorities and diasporic mobilities that queer ethnicity while also calling attention to what Roderick Ferguson calls racialized sexualities, nonheteronormative racial formations, and "other terrains for the interrogation of sexuality...that do not begin and end with queer studies." Methodologically, this interdisciplinary course surveys a broad range of approaches: production histories, textual, historical, and formal analyses (visuality, narrative, and sound), and reflexive critiques of queer film festivals and academic pedagogy.

0.50
St. George
In Class