2023-24 Academic Catalog

As cultural and historical texts, narrative films offer important insight into the cultures that produce and view them. Entertainment media teach us about how to see the world, including what counts as difference—abilities, genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, identities—and these categories’ meanings and commitments. The messages are “political” in many ways, signaling who has what kinds of: authority, power, resources, and capacities. In this class, we use communications theory, historical and contemporary discourses on race, feminist theory, and political psychology to examine depictions of identity in U.S. cinema, comparing and contrasting Hollywood and independent filmmakers’ works.