Love Hurts: Romance, Media, Masochism

Catalog description

The widespread popularity, profitability, and critical derision of mainstream romance media, from ABC’s prolific The Bachelor franchise to Fifty Shades of Grey, affirms masochism—the enjoyment of what is painful—as a key subject for film and media studies. This course will pair a range of film and television romance texts—from global art cinema to Hollywood rom-coms to reality TV—with conceptual frameworks at the intersections of pain, personhood, and performance. We’ll survey the critical lenses media studies offers for the contemplation of historically derided objects, including genre studies (melodrama, pornography), platform analyses (reality, soap), to critical theory (including queer and affect-based approaches), working collectively to historicize and defamiliarize contemporary mediations of amity, intimacy, and identity.