Faculty First Year Seminars 191AFA3 - Race and Gender at the Movies

This Faculty First-Year Seminar interrogates the representation of race and gender in American cinema. Engaging historical, literary, and filmic texts, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped the development, performance, and portrayal of identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the interlocking relationships and representations of whites and blacks, as well as the sexes. Beginning with Birth of a Nation (1915), this seminar moves along chronological and thematic axes to investigate racial and gender formation and the reproduction of racial and gender ideologies and identities. Racial mixing, cross-racial, and cross-gender performances (i.e. passing, blackface minstrelsy, and cross-dressing) will be critical to this course, as they best highlight the fundamental premises and contradictions of identity formation and thinking. This seminar also will explore historical and contemporary discourses around sex and sexuality.

Freshmen Only