Witches and Monsters: Fear of the Supernatural Woman in Film and Literature

This course will cover the foundational scholarship on feminist interpretations and readings of culture, such as Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” and Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” These key feminist texts will ground our analyses of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and film genres such as horror.

By the completion of this course, students will:

• Understand how critical analysis of popular and high cultures can reveal and help articulate the gender dynamics that (re-)produce various inequalities

• Identify ways to move forward through political and cultural practices