Module description
This module provides an examination of the history, theorization and criticism of screen sex, exploring the conditions through which sex, carnality and corporeal pleasures are made visible and palpable via the moving image. Proceeding chronologically, with a focus on primarily American and European film industrial contexts, the module explores varied methodological approaches to screen sexuality and the erotic-spanning film exhibition and industrial histories, legal history, feminist film and queer theories, cultural theory, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, political theory and sociology. The module tracks how such approaches have made sense of the appearance, mediation, transformation, and regulation of screen sex and cinematic embodiment across varied modes of production, from classical Hollywood, independent and underground cinemas, art cinema, sexploitation, stag films and hard-core pornographies. The module will contend with the fundamental difficulties and enticements, conceptual and material-on the ontological, aesthetic, legal, industrial levels-that the cinema has had in "speaking" and envisioning the sex act and the carnal appetites, from Edison's kinetoscopes and peep shows to the contemporary digital moment.
Assessment details
Participation (15%), 1 x 2000-word essay (25%), 1 x 3000-word essay (60%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module aims to provide an understanding of the history, theorization and criticism of screen sex since the early-twentieth-century. Students will rigorously examine the manifestation of screen sexuality through approaches that account for
1) the industrial determinants that conditioned the appearance of screen sexuality in cinema across different modes of film practice
2 ) the legal regulation and discursive construction of screen sex as a moral and aesthetic problem for cinema
3) the social contexts and cultural conditions that contributed to the management and excitation that sexual imagery incited,
4) the representational conventions that attended different modes of production and genres of sexual representation across history,
5) notions of spectatorship, pleasure, reception and audience and their instrumentality in understanding screen sex and its corporeal appeals.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to:
Demonstrate a systematic and thorough understanding of the history of screen sex and its regulation, as well as account for changing discourses of obscenity and screen propriety, and film industrial determinants and conditions that organize and legislate sexual representation.
Articulate sophisticated arguments regarding the place of screen sex in wider film industrial, regulatory, ideological and aesthetic formations and practices.
Effectively examine and analyse different methodologies and disciplinary approaches to the negotiation of screen sexuality and its analysis.
Demonstrate in-depth understanding of and skill at assessing aesthetic traditions and conventions of sexual representation in relation to more contemporary and global film practices that mobilize corporeal strategies and cinematic sex acts.
Using the module bibliography and required readings as a starting point, conduct library and archival research engaging with questions of obscenity, sexuality, corporeality and cinema’s erotic and carnal historicity.
Select, synthesize, and apply diverse theoretical concepts and frameworks from film history, film theory and cultural theory, towards the original analysis of specific film texts situated in their historical contexts.
Teaching pattern
Ten two and a half-hour screenings and ten two-hour seminars
Suggested reading list
Core course readings will be provided.