AFRS 267 - Topics in Gender, Media, Culture

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This topics course focuses on gender as it plays out in any number of forms of culture and media. Various texts help elucidate how gender is constructed, represented, and consumed, with important interventions derived from feminist theory, queer theory, media and cultural studies.

Topic for 2025/26a. AIDS Activist Media & New Queer Cinema. (Same as WFQS 267) AIDS activism and the feminist radicalism that it built on energized a vibrant film and video scene that broke from earlier, more conventional (sometimes maudlin) representations of queer lives. As critic B. Ruby Rich argued in a 1992 article (in which she coined the term “New Queer Cinema”), these works didn’t share “a single aesthetic vocabulary,” but they asserted a new style: intrepid, angry, cheeky, postmodern, and “full of pleasure.” From camcorder activism and the daring sex education graphics of AIDS activist media emerged a new generation of queer filmmakers of color, including Cheryl Dunye, Richard Fung, Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Wong Kar-Wai, and Yvonne Welbon. New Queer Cinema drew inspiration from the joy and erotics of defiance. Hiram Perez.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS