Admission requirements
Not applicable
Description
This course offers a new way to watch films and look at the images surrounding us in our daily lived experiences. Theorists like Mulvey, Dyer and Doane show us how voyeurism and exhibitionism play important roles in the ways that viewers experience films. Others like Berger, Pollock, Halberstam and hooks demonstrate how the act of looking – at visual art works, advertisements, images in popular culture but also, disputably, at each other – is highly gendered and mostly dominated by the White male gaze. In this course, on the basis of classic Hollywood favourites, more subversive cinema, photography, and your own found material, we problematize standardized ways of gendered looking and how we might look differently at images of men and women. We will learn how visual texts organize who is to be seen as well as the (ideal) spectator position. We will analyse how films and other texts from visual culture both structure and disrupt the gaze. We explore genres like the nude and male pin-up, study the gender-specific pleasures of suspense films and thrillers, examine how race and sexuality structure relations of looking, and discuss queer and trans* images that disrupt a binary understanding of bodies.
Course objectives
After completion of the course:
the student has knowledge of the theoretical debates on gender and visual culture and has insight in their main controversies;
the student masters the most important concepts that feature in theories on gender and visual culture;
the student is able to deploy these critical concepts and discussions in their analysis of visual material (film, photography, tv and visual arts);
the student is able to independently select cultural phenomena that are relevant to the discussion about the “look” and to analyze the organization of the “gaze” from an intersectional gender studies perspective.
Timetable
The timetables are available through MyTimetable.
Mode of instruction
Lectures mixed with workgroup class meetings
Assessment method
Assessment
- Discussion Point: Bring one topic, question or object to offer up for general discussion. This could be a fragment from the readings, an object, concept or argument. This can be a question that came up in relation to the readings, a particular fragment that you’d like to discuss together, a concept that draws the readings together, or an object with which to discuss the readings in a productive way. We will assign students to a week during the first session. Upload your discussion point (of 50-100 words) on the Discussion Board on the Thursday previous to the class meeting.
- Paper Proposal: Start to already think about your final paper in week 1. In week 4, you’ll submit a 350-500 word paper proposal in which you: introduce a visual text, connect it to at least two course readings and clearly state how your analysis of this visual text contributes to debates about gender, looking, and visual culture.
- Final Paper: select one visual text (i.e. a film, documentary, comic, painting, photograph, etc.) and provide a critical close reading of how this visual text contributes to debates about gender, looking and visual culture. Upload your paper of 1500-1800 words, including the selected image(s) on Turnitin on the 20th of December 2023.
Weighing
- Discussion Point: complete/incomplete
- Paper Proposal: 25% of final grade
- Final Paper: 75% of final grade
Resit
A resit of the final paper is possible in case of an insufficient final grade
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
Longer academic texts are available through the ‘collegeplank’ in the University Library and can be copied on site. Shorter texts are posted on Brightspace.
Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Arsenaal.
Remarks
-