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 workbut produce and conceptualize?

THE CARNAL SCREEN -FINAL RESEARCH ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Essay title:

•This essay should be 3000 words.

•See module outline/departmental websitefor 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 inour 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 workbut produce and conceptualize?

•What is the relationship between sexual representation and questions of aesthetic formin your chosen film?

•What are the contexts of production,reception, and regulationof 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 yourspecific research questionisand identifying your thesis argument.Suggested topics orgroupings of possible types of papers/paper topics

:•An examination of a film or a group of films, whichhave 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 ac

t•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/raceand visibility

•sex work and sex as work

•camp sex and irony

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