GENDER FLOWS
Syllabus
Updated A.Y. 2022-2023
Course Description:
This course will use the perspective of Visual Studies to explore the changes in gender identity and, as a consequence of that, on any individual and collective identities in the American society in the past twenty years. The main tool used in the course will be TV series and essays.
Visual Studies originated from the fact that our culture is becoming more and more visual and that there is a gap between the wealth of visual experience and the ability to analyze it. The world as a text has been replaced by the world–as-a-picture. Such world pictures cannot be purely visual, but by the same token the visual disrupts and challenges any attempt to define culture in purely linguistic terms. At the heart of the construction of the image in Visual Studies, a displaced location of knowledge, there is an element which determined their birth, questioning the disciplinary position that the visual should occupy within the existent disciplines: the shattering strength of women movements around the world. In the academic field thanks to the studies on gender and sexuality, the disciplinary assets have been changed, challenging the traditional system of disciplines and the borders between them. Therefore, Visual Studies represent a new emergent body of knowledge which concentrates on the continuous formation and transformation of any individual and collective identities in the social structure. Their task is to make re-emerge ghosts which a conventional reading would leave invisible. The women movements in many countries around the world challenged and continue to challenge the traditional asset of many societies influencing all the western world and the American society. They speak different languages, sometimes they live in diasporic places, sometimes they are prisoners of the past, of their assigned roles and bodies; some other times they are really in prison, they are nomads, migrants, transgenders; many of them come from countries which paid a high price to colonialism.
Find more information in the Syllabus