THE CARNAL SCREEN -FINAL RESEARCH ESSAY
This essay should be 3000 words.
•See module outline/departmental website for departmental guidelines on presentation, referencing, etc. Detailed Description Your final research essay requires you to synthesize the material we have discussed, read and watched in class in order to articulate an argument regarding a film (or group of films), a particular debate about sexuality, gender and corporeality in the moving image, or a set of aesthetic or cultural practices in film or moving image culture.
You are STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to examine films beyond the syllabus and what we have seen in full in our module screenings. While you will not be penalized for choosing a film on the syllabus, you are urged to seek out other works we have not screened. Please contact me for suggested films and to discuss your essay topic.Your paper should consider the function of sexuality, gender, and/or embodiment as an animating problematic within the films or media texts you are discussing. Some organizing questions that will help guide your research:
•What kinds of discourses sexuality does your text engage with? How might sexuality be theorized by the film in question? What ideas about sexuality does the work but produce and conceptualize?
•What is the relationship between sexual representation and questions of aesthetic form in your chosen film?
•What are the contexts of production,reception, and regulation of your chosen text(s), and how might these inform your understandings of its operation?What kinds of spaces has the work screened in and what kinds of spectatorship does it presume/address?
You should begin your essay at the outset stating what your specific research question is and identifying your thesis argument.Suggested topics or groupings of possible types of papers/paper topics:
•An examination of a film or a group of films, which have thematic affinities, such as:
•queer subtexts/sensibilities/identities and aesthetics
•the body in ecstasy/filming and representing pleasure
•female desire, female authorship and the sex act
•non-normative sexual practices
•public v. private space
•tease as performative logic
•erotic consumption/consumerism/sex as a commodity form
•masculinity and its construction/contestation
•the racializing logics of sexuality/race and visibility
•sex work and sex as work
•camp sex and irony
•embodiment, hapticity and corporeality
•figurations of adultery and non-coupled sexuality
•utopian v. dystopian sex –sexual futures
•A discussion of a filmmaker or moving image maker’s work in terms of their treatment of sexuality/ gender/embodiment (for ex. Giraudie, Breillat, Poole, Anger, Schneemann, Araki, Sarno, Machaty)
• An examination of a particular mode of production through a set of representative films (for ex. Art Cinema, Underground Film, Sexploitation, Independent cinema, Hollywood, Blaxploitation, Hard-core pornography)
•An examination of elements of performance and acting in relation to cinemas of carnality –for ex. Explorations of the construction of the “face of pleasure” in orgasm; striptease and burlesque performativity; direct address and theatricality; forms of excess and spectacle; gender codes and sexual performance
•An analysis of a film’saesthetics of corporeality and significance as they are constituted in relation to:
a) regulation of sexuality,
b) discourses of obscenity
c)in relation to industrial or economic exigencies
d) contexts of exhibition and circulation
•An examination of specific sexualized spaces(public or private)and/or contexts of film exhibition:the movie theater, the cruising ground, the bedroom, the bar as domains of sexual sociality in and for cinema
•An exploration of a particular theoretical problem in the critical discourses or philosophy of sexuality that gets materialized in a moving image work–for ex. Questions of queer desire, visibility and invisibility; racialization;dominance & submission
•Digital cinema, digital culture and the carnal screen-in what ways do online formats retrain or enchain desire in new or resurgent ways?Your paper should have a clear thesis and organizing research question and cogent line of argument that is identified early on in the paper. It should also draw on resources and scholarship from beyond the syllabus.Please consult the extended bibliography in the syllabus on KEATS for suggested books and articles to seek out. You are also encouraged to use both primary and secondary sources as part of your research. At minimum, your essay should reference at least 5scholarly sources.I am happy to provide reading and film suggestions and give you feedback on your paper topic. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
