VES Course Explores Queer Cinema

Tired of poring over economics text-books? Want to read a book titled Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies instead?

It's required reading in VES 153aar, "Bodies That Matter: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Queer Cinema and Video Art."

Isaac Julien, an independent filmmaker and visiting lecturer, is teaching the seminar, which examines how social and cultural dilemmas are depicted in the visual arts.

In the process, it exposes some students to issues they've never pondered before.

During the first meeting, students watched Paris Is Burning, a documentary about transvestite and transsexual dancers in New York City.

Chase T. Tingley '99, a computer science concentrator taking the class because he was lotteried out of Historical Studies B-61, "The Warren Court," says he had never seen a film like it before.

"It was my first visual exposure to it," he said of the transsexuality depicted in the documentary.

Yet one student who attended Tuesday's screening says he could relate to the film.

"As a drag performer, I definitely identified with one of the characters," he told the class.

A filmmaker for 15 years, Julien won the Critic's Week Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. He is part of a movement of filmmakers known as new queer cinema, a major focus of the course.

He says his interest in his work stems from personal experience. A native of England, Julien is black and gay.

"I embody these questions myself," he says.

The new queer cinema movement--which began among independent filmmakers in the early 1990s and was introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992--differs from traditional gay and lesbian cinema by treating sexuality and other issues with increased complexity.

Rather than simply defending homosexuality, new queer cinema seeks to address social issues in a creative, energetic and clever manner that appeals to wider audiences.

Students in the course will watch films by directors Derek Jarman, Angelina Macarone and Tsai Ming-Iiang, among others. They will also read essays by theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.

In teaching the films--which include other documentaries and Asian cinema--Julien seeks to end what he calls an unnecessary separation between discussions of race and sexuality.

"Why do questions of queerness remain under-theorized in debates around race and representation, and why are questions of race more or less disavowed in queer cinema?" the syllabus asks.

In addition to watching the films--shown every Monday at 5:30 p.m.--students must write one five to six page paper and another 10 to 15 page paper. There is no midterm or final.

Each three-hour class begins with Julien's lecture and ends with a discussion with the filmmaker. Fewer than 40 people attended the first lecture.

"Anybody who's kind of trendy [or] thinking about different issues of identity" would enjoy the course, Julien says.

James C. Augustine '01, a women's studies concentrator, says he wants to take the class because it mixes queer theory and performance theory.

"It's one of the few courses that seems to be really focusing on that sort of stuff," he says.

The course meets Tuesdays from 6-9 p.m. in the Carpenter Center. Julien also teaches Afro-American Studies 187y, "Black Cinema as Genre--From Blax-ploitation to Quentin Tarantino" this semester.