The Kids Are Not Alright: LGBTQIA+ Identity and Introductory Film Studies

Biographical Sketch

Stephanie O'Brien is a lecturer in the Mass Communication Department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She is currently a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie has been teaching in higher education for eleven years at both the community college and university levels. Prior to becoming an educator, she worked for over seventeen years in the motion picture and television industries. She is a member of the Director's Guild of America.

Type of Presentation

Individual presentation

Brief Description of Presentation

This presentation will include a reading of brief passages from the paper as well as a slide presentation that presents some interactive moments for audience participation.

Abstract of Proposal

In attempting to address a broad range of students, introductory film studies curriculum serves to reinforce the marginalization of certain student identities that do not conform to hegemonic ideals reinforced through classical analysis. By considering the structure, language, and examples used in survey film studies curriculum we can begin to see a pattern of knowledge that illuminates a historical privileging of western, patriarchal, heteronormative ideologies within critical film literacy. In countering the unified student addressed by introductory survey film studies, we should build a curriculum that allows for multiple ways of meaning-making that are relational and contextual.

LGBTQIA+ student identities are considered through a lens of critical identity studies and a case study that analyzes introductory film studies textbooks for representation of LGBTQIA+ filmmakers. How might the erasure of these filmmakers’ work require that students perform what Muñoz (1999) terms, disidentification, a means of survival for those individuals whose identities reside on the margins of society? Disidentification recognizes both the normative and exclusionary properties of meaning and thus allows for an empowering of marginalized identities as they rework and revise cultural texts (p. 31). By revising the meaning of cultural texts, marginalized identities repurpose the texts in ways that provide a path of survival and agency. How could we re-envision introductory film studies textbooks that, rather than requiring LGBTQIA+ students to perform disidentification, instead moves toward a relational process of meaning-making that considers assemblages of identities, interwoven forces that merge and dissipate through time and space (Puar (2007); Weheliye (2014))?

Munoz, J. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press.

Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Durham: Duke University Press.

Weheliye, A.G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Location

Session 1D (Habersham, Hilton Garden Inn)

Start Date

2-22-2019 10:30 AM

End Date

2-22-2019 12:00 PM

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Feb 22nd, 10:30 AM Feb 22nd, 12:00 PM

The Kids Are Not Alright: LGBTQIA+ Identity and Introductory Film Studies

Session 1D (Habersham, Hilton Garden Inn)

In attempting to address a broad range of students, introductory film studies curriculum serves to reinforce the marginalization of certain student identities that do not conform to hegemonic ideals reinforced through classical analysis. By considering the structure, language, and examples used in survey film studies curriculum we can begin to see a pattern of knowledge that illuminates a historical privileging of western, patriarchal, heteronormative ideologies within critical film literacy. In countering the unified student addressed by introductory survey film studies, we should build a curriculum that allows for multiple ways of meaning-making that are relational and contextual.

LGBTQIA+ student identities are considered through a lens of critical identity studies and a case study that analyzes introductory film studies textbooks for representation of LGBTQIA+ filmmakers. How might the erasure of these filmmakers’ work require that students perform what Muñoz (1999) terms, disidentification, a means of survival for those individuals whose identities reside on the margins of society? Disidentification recognizes both the normative and exclusionary properties of meaning and thus allows for an empowering of marginalized identities as they rework and revise cultural texts (p. 31). By revising the meaning of cultural texts, marginalized identities repurpose the texts in ways that provide a path of survival and agency. How could we re-envision introductory film studies textbooks that, rather than requiring LGBTQIA+ students to perform disidentification, instead moves toward a relational process of meaning-making that considers assemblages of identities, interwoven forces that merge and dissipate through time and space (Puar (2007); Weheliye (2014))?

Munoz, J. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press.

Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Durham: Duke University Press.

Weheliye, A.G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.