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First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-1)

Topic

Millennial Gender

Instructors

Nicholas K Davis
847/491-3433
1897 Sheridan, Uh 215, Evanston, IL 60208

Meeting Info

555 Clark 230: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

For good reason, we often discuss or internally experience our genders and sexualities within the terms, frames, and knowledges available to us now. When we admit that genders and sexualities are not just "inborn" or unchanging over time, many of the histories we excavate stretch back for centuries. Resisting both impulses, this course uses popular cinema in the US and around the world to assess just how much changes in our notions of gender identity and sexual desire even over short spans of time—25 years, to be exact, which is lengthy for those not yet born in 1999-2000 but just yesterday for those of us who were engaged in these conversations and self-discoveries as a new millennium started. Students will learn that all kinds of films, from studio blockbusters to tiny independents, took unusually overt interest in changing categories and expansive experiences of gender and sexuality around the Y2K moment: the era of All About My Mother, Fight Club, Ghost Dog, Boys Don't Cry, But I'm a Cheerleader, Election, and many other enduring touchstones. We will also investigate how evolving fields like feminism and queer theory plus burgeoning scholarship in trans studies and masculinity studies were generating vocabularies, challenging assumptions, and entering into spirited debates in the same moment. Through a combination of discussions and writing assignments, some collective and some self-determined, students will gain valuable skills (how to close-read a movie, how to engage a scholarly article) and also engage in a quarter-long, inquisitive, respectful, and hopefully surprising conversation about the recent past, fluid present, and possible futures of gender and sexuality, on and off screen.

Learning Objectives

How to compare, contrast, and meaningfully employ changing languages and concepts of gender and sexuality over time; How to analyze a film in medium-specific detail; How to read, respond to, and write scholarly arguments about gender and sexuality; How to analyze creative texts AND academic writing in their original cultural context AND in today's world.

Teaching Method

Small-group discussion, writing assignments of varying kinds and lengths

Evaluation Method

Papers, Other writing assignments, Class Participation, Attendance

Class Materials (Required)

All course materials will be provided on Canvas.

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar