This course will focus on topics in national, transnational, and global cinema, television, photography, and/or new media.

This course explores how queer cinema is mutually articulated with the contested notion of the global. In what ways does queerness help us to imagine a different world order? And how might post-colonial critique, critical race theory, diasporic thought, and analyses of neoliberal globalization reframe the conditioning parameters for queer politics? Across a range of media practices from Kenya, Thailand, Taiwan, Tunisia, India, Spain, Iran, Italy, the Philippines, and Brazil, among other countries, we will look at how the politics and formal innovations of cinematic aesthetics have been influenced by dynamics of sexual dissidence, subcultural kinship, and the fight for social and legal recognition for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) communities across various national and transnational contexts. Looking at a broad range of queer media, this course will include narrative films, documentaries, and video art by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Deepa Mehta, The Nest Collective, and Isabel Sandoval, among others; consider the queer and transnational reception of lip-synching and animation and explore issues ranging from queer temporality, alternative public cultures, the AIDS crisis, and the queer reception of mainstream representation by minoritarian audiences. Readings in queer, trans, feminist, postcolonial and film and media studies will inform our close attention to questions of film form as well as the cultural and institutional contexts in which cinema circulates.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills