Film and Video - Spring 1999

Television is a vast and ever-expanding text, one that is constantly evolving into new forms and through new and different outlets. This class will focus on the history of American television and will attempt to navigate a course between TV's industrial history and America's changing social and cultural climate, exploring the multifarious connections between the two. The class is loosely structured around the changing nature of the American family, and will explore related issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, childhood, social and domestic space, fantasy, reality, genre, progress, television fandoms, and postmodernity.

Historical television shows from the past fifty years will be screened and discussed as we explore the ways that television has been shaped by American culture and vice versa.

This course is designed to be an overview of homosexuality in American film and video, and an exploration of queerness in mass media. To that end, it employs Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet as a seminal history text, and more recent collections of essays on queer media theory. Organized somewhat chronologically, the course first explores a baseline of Hollywood homophobia and the formal and historical attempts to change it. Queer reading practices and the queerness inherent within many popular mainstream texts will be explored. Finally, the course will conclude with several weeks devoted to recent independent queer film and video. Topics discussed will include authorship, spectatorship, genre and genre reappropriation, historical gender constructs, mainstream vs. independent production, sexuality and race, drag, camp, current queer styles, AIDS, and AIDS activism.

Revised 8/2/04.