What does women’s cinema signify? Is it cinema created exclusively by women, for women? Or is it cinema the puts women at its center? Concurrently, do these narratives about women privilege one type of woman over another? More importantly, how do we understand and interrogate these questions within non-western and global contexts? This course will delve into the multiple subjectivities, socio-cultural geographies, media practices and political activism that is folded into the category called ‘women’s cinema’. Beginning with an exploration of the 1970s “cine-feminism” that focused on women’s filmmaking and political activism, we will expand our discussion to transnational contexts and explore how feminist politics advocated by female and male filmmakers influence an understanding of women-oriented issues, forms, and values in circulation. We will examine women’s films produced within national and transnational geo-cultural spaces posing questions about national versus exilic or postcolonial auteur subjectivities. In doing so we will analyze the films’ aesthetics, institutional context of production, global circulation and situate them within the larger theoretical framework of feminist film theory, female vs. male authorship, postcolonial studies and transnational feminist scholarship. This course primarily focuses on Women’s cinema from the global south such as South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Course Requirements:

Attendance and participation, in-class responses, Wikipedia project, class presentations.

Intended Audience:

Advanced FTVM Majors/Non-Majors (preferably Juniors and Seniors) with an interest in issues of gender, race, feminism, intersectionality in relation to women-oriented films.