Gender Sexuality Studies

This course examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, place, ability, status, race, and class in the cultural construction of bodies and how we respond to bodies. It focuses on the relationship between the normal and the abject to highlight how that relationship influences which bodies arouse our desire and move us in disgust. We will consider both mainstream and independent filmmaking and other visual arts in order to more fully investigate the rhetorics of the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, the realistic, the inscrutable, and the repulsive in regard to these bodies. More than just looking at 'images of' - and -identities,- we will concentrate on theories of the production and perpetration of the bodies we see and how we see them.