Course details

Name: ENFL - 365

Title: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FILM

Section: 01

Semester: Fall - 2022

Credits: 3

Description:
This course looks at the development of Hollywood censorship under the Motion Picture Production Code as it cultivated and shaped ideas about gender, race, and sexuality in film from 1934 to 1968. Following constitutional precedents in Mutual Film v. Ohio (1915), film censorship expanded throughout the progressive era and continued into the Great Depression in tandem with religious activism. Our lessons will study how national debates and prior cultural histories shaped the development of the Production Code from sensational films of the 1910s to Hollywood’s sex scandals of the 1920s. Enforced by industry figures like Will Hays and Joseph Breen, the Code’s rules for creating “compensating moral value” had significant effects on the representation of female agency, queer desire, and public understandings of sexuality. Surveying archival notes from the Code’s enforcers, we will consider how film producers developed strategies to circumvent industry restrictions around bawdy humor, explicit violence, homosexuality, and interracial desire among other issues. To finish, this course examines the effects of cinema’s expanding free speech protections in the 1950s and 1960s on gender & sexual representation before the adoption of the contemporary ratings system.

Last updated on 2022-03-25 By Lykidis Alexios (lykidisa)

Schedule: Tuesday From 2:30 pm To 5:15 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Genre Study (Film)
• Women and Gender Studies (3c)

Teaching Faculty: Reinhard Michael (reinhardm)

Is course canceled: No