w o m e n

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w o m e n c i n e m a
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• Introductions
• Syllabus
• Readings for Next Week
• Schedule 3 630

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Three Sections

• Part I
• Unhampered Passage Producing Normative
  Categories
• Part II
• Ambiguous Relationship Playing with Boundaries
• Part III
• The Art of Subversion Crossing Over

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The Film Experience

• No art passes our conscience in the way film
  does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep
  down into the dark rooms of our souls. Ingmar
  Bergman (b. 1918), Swedish stage and film writer,
  director. Quoted in John Berger,
• "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye," Sight and Sound
  (London, June 1991).)
• Why do we watch films?

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• d e s i r e

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• The Dark Knight
• Spider-Man 3
• Dead Man's Chest
• Revenge of the Sith
• Shrek 2
• Return of the King
• Spider-Man
• Harry Potter / Sorcerer's Stone
• The Grinch
• The Phantom Menace
• Saving Private Ryan
• Titanic
• Independence Day

• Toy Story
• Forrest Gump
• Jurassic Park
• Aladdin
• Terminator 2
• Home Alone
• Batman
• Rain Man
• Three Men and a Baby
• Top Gun
• Back to the Future
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Return of the Jedi
• Raiders / Lost Ark
• The Empire Strikes Back

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• At the root(s) of gender studies are questions
  about and theories of power. What kinds of power
  exist? How is power constructed, produced, and
  legitimated? How does studying power help us to
  understand the continuing history of inequality
  and injustice in the world? In order to arrive at
  this larger question, we will consider, in the
  context of film, how we are formed as subjects
  culturally. In order to assess this formation,
  students must learn to read and critically
  analyze films as texts, texts with which we are
  in conversation both consciously and
  unconsciously. And further still, students will
  be asked to consider how cultural texts are
  shaped by certain dominant ideologies.
• Q? What do you think it means to think of film
  as a text?

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• In short, taking on this work means questioning
  the stories we tell about ourselves, asking why
  some stories are constantly repeated while others
  never told, and how the stories we do see over
  and over shape our understanding of ourselves.
• In other words, we must ask how much our
  understanding of reality is determined by the
  media we consume? To what extent are our
  identities as gendered, raced, and classed people
  shaped by mass media in general and popular film
  in particular?

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• At the heart of this course, then, is the paradox
  of art and social justice. Art is often used to
  seduce us into restrictive and problematic
  societal structures, into worlds that imprison us
  and lure us away from reality and away from each
  other. But art is also used to emancipate us from
  these very constraints. We turn to popular,
  Hollywood cinema so that we can assess those
  pieces of art that billions of people take in on
  a daily basis, art that often takes us further
  from each other and a more just world.