Film and Reading List

Film and Reading List #

🔗 Click the topic links below or to the left to see weekly writing prompts, student work, and more.
Topic Film Reading
Introduction A League of Their Own (1992, dir. by Penny Marshall)
The Male Gaze Dance, Girl, Dance (1940, dir. by Dorothy Arzner) Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; John Berger, Ways of Seeing chapter 3
The Panopticon The Hitch-Hiker (1952, dir. by Ida Lupino) Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish
Penetrating Looks The Slumber Party Massacre (1982, dir. by Amy Holden Jones) Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself” from Men, Women, and Chainsaws
Disciplinary Gender Beau Travail (1999, dir. by Claire Denis) Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” from Gender Trouble
Imperial Leather The Piano (1993, dir. by Jane Campion) Anne McClintock, “The Lay of the Land” from Imperial Leather
Picturing Colonial Violence Sambizanga (1972, dir. by Sarah Maldoror) Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth; The Combahee River Collective Statement
The Settler Colonial Gaze Meek’s Cutoff (2010, dir. by Kelly Reichart) Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation”
The Veil The Day I Became a Woman (2000, dir. by Marziyeh Meshkiny) Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”
Property and the White Gaze The ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston (1936); Daughters of the Dust (1991, dir. by Julie Dash) Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property” sections I and II
The Oppositional Gaze The Watermelon Woman (1996, dir. by Cheryl Dunye) bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze”’ So Mayer, “Uncommon Sensuality: New Queer Feminist Film/Theory”
Queer Lewks Paris is Burning (1990, dir. by Jennie Livingston) Michelle Parkerson, “Birth of a Notion”; Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”
Decolonizing Film Mauri (1988, dir. by Merata Mita) Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”