A History of Sexuality Through Cinema

What do films teach us about sex and sexuality? How do they shape the ways we understand interpersonal intimacy, gendered identity, and the desiring body? This course traces the history of sexuality as it unfolds through the global language of cinema, from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958, USA), Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, UK), and Wong Kar-wai' s Happy Together (1997, Hong Kong) to Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999, USA), Ousmane Sembene's Moolade (2004, Senegal), Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011, UK), Sergio Tovar Velarde's Four Moons (2014, Mexico), and Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, France). Spanning eight weeks and eight films across continents, this course invites students to explore how cinema not only reflects but also produces cultural understandings of sex, gender, and desire. Students will be introduced to the basics of film form, such as image, sound, montage, and performance, alongside key theoretical frameworks from writers on sexuality, including Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Brinda Bose, and Angela Jones. By reading these thinkers in conversation with cinema, students will gain tools to historicize sexuality, to see how norms of gender, pleasure, and power shift across time and place, and how film both enacts and contests those shifts. Assignments will combine close reading and viewing: short weekly reflections, in-class discussions, and a final project that may take the form of either an analytical essay or a creative piece with a strong critical component, finalized in consultation with the instructor. This class will appeal to students interested in film studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural history, and global media. No prior coursework in these fields is required. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed not only a deeper understanding of the politics and aesthetics of sexuality but also a more nuanced eye for how cinema gives shape to desire, and to the histories we inherit through it.