Reading & Composition

Somewhere between the private and the public, the personal and the relational, the imagined and the real, sexuality emerges on the scene. In film, a scene suggests the action that takes place in a single location and a continuous time. In effect, a scene gives coherence to that action. Sexuality is a powerfully disruptive force that challenges continuous, linear time by drawing past, present, and future into unexpected relations. The scene provides the conditions for sexuality to emerge at the same time as it is transformed by sexuality. What is the function of the “scene” in film, literature, and fantasy, and how does it structure sexuality? How does the scene make some expressions of sexuality possible and others impossible? How does sexuality challenge conventional relations of space and time? 

Film and literature afford us a view of the desires and fantasies that typically take place “behind the scenes” of sexuality. They also allow us to consider how the often traumatic event of sexuality is constituted as a “crime scene” or the “original scene” that will continue to inform later representations of sexuality. Furthermore, film and literature allow us to analyze the interactions between the psychic and the social—the scenes where desire and fantasy interact with social dynamics of power and history. To this end, we will discuss how gender, race, class, and (dis)ability inform scenes of sexuality. And we will consider, among other things, subcultural scenes of sexuality, feminist perspectives on the “sex scene,” and queer theoretical readings of the “scene.”

Reading List:
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Principles of Kinship”
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
D.A. Miller, “Elio’s Education”
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume One, “We ‘Other’ Victorians” and “The Repressive Hypothesis”
Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema”
Chantal Ackerman, TBD
Anthology Film Archives feminist experimental cinema
Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
Edward II (Derek Jarman, 1991)
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Sappho fragments
Audre Lorde “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as PowerCavafy, selected poems
Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother; Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia