Gender + Visual Culture
A SYLLABUS — University of California, Riverside
The goal of this interactive course is to assist students in understanding how representations of gender in visual culture impact our personal and political lives. Students are required to engage with the theoretical texts listed on the syllabus and encouraged to introduce visual content to share at each meeting.
(Assignments: Article 1 — 25%, Article 2 — 25%, Attendance/Pop Quizzes — 25%, Podcast 25%)
Week 1: Women and the Power of Looking
August 1: Introduction
- Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze visual pleasure and narrative cinema
Watch: Stepford Wives (1974)
- Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding Model” (1973)
- bell hooks’ Oppositional Gaze
- Althusser’s ideological state apparatus +repressive state apparatus
August 3, 2017: Class-y Looks
- Teresa de Lauretis’ The Technology of Gender
- Althusser’s Reproduction of Labor Power
- Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates your Gender/Performance V Performative
Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1974)
Week 2: Look Back At It
August 8, 2017: Misrepresentations, Not Stereotypes
- Kimberle Crenshaw’s Intersectionality (Representational, Structural, and Political)
- Vorris Nunley on tropes
- bell hooks’ “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women”
Watch: Set it Off (1996)
August 10, 2017: The Prison is Our New Stage (and that is not okay)
- Angela Davis’ “Public Imprisonment and Private Violence: Reflections on the Hidden Punishment of Women” from Frontline Feminisms, pgs, 3–16.
- Angela Davis’ “How Gender Structures the Prison System” from Are Prisons Obsolete? pgs. 60–84
Watch: Orange is the New Black (2012)
Watch: Episode 1 of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017)
In class: selected scenes from Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Week 3: Seeing Feminism
August 15, 2017: “seeing is an act that proceeds action”
*Discussion: Charlottesville
- cont. Angela Davis’ “Public Imprisonment and Private Violence: Reflections on the Hidden Punishment of Women” from Frontline Feminisms, pgs, 3–16.
- cont. Angela Davis’ “How Gender Structures the Prison System” from Are Prisons Obsolete? pgs. 60–84
August 17, 2017: envisioning asymmetry and something beyond equality
Quiz
- Luisa Muraro’s “Beyond Equality”
- Paul Virilio’s The Vision Machine (ch 5)
Week 4: Men Filming Feminism
August 22: Federico Fellini
In Class Screening: Federico Fellini La città delle donne (1980)
BRING SNACKS!
- Frank Burke’s Reading of La città delle donne
- Discussion on Fellini and Feminism
August 24: Pan Nalin
Watch: Angry Indian Goddesses (2015, Netflix)
- Lucinda Joy Peach’s “Is Violence Male? The Law, Gender, and Violence” (pgs 58–72)
- Vesna Kesic’s From “Reverence to Rape: An Anthropology of Ethnic and
Genderized Violence” (25–39)
Week 5: Under Western Eyes, Values, and Laws
Sari Squad
Dirty Picture
Parched
Fire
Chandra Mohanty’s under western eyes
indian policy on gay marriage/criminalization
Week 5: visual culture and public spaces — Being a minority in public space
Gulab Gang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXhvmu9_uSg
nimisha bhanot
