Feminist Film and Media History

Catalog description

Prerequisite: a prior film history course or seminar in a related discipline What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and US film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments. Italian Cinema