Filming American Feminisms: Teaching Through Time

“I am a film minor and I have taken a lot of technical film analysis and production classes, but in this class, with the combination of film and theory, I thought about how those tools are actually used in film to create social change and send social and political messages.”

“I am a film minor and want to be a filmmaker—I have taken a lot of classes in film but this class, in which I am seeing all the connections between the films and the feminist theory, made me actually excited to go out in the world and make films paying attention to the representation of women/gender, race and sexuality.”¹

Introduction

The comments above, and others scattered through this article, come from students enrolled in my Fall 2018 course, Filming American Feminisms, which is cross-listed in women’s and gender studies (WGST), English, and the film studies minor. The comments were collected at a debriefing session at the end of the Fall 2018 course. I developed this course five years ago as one of two replacements for the required History of Feminist Thought core course in our WGST major. Conceptually, that course was essential to our major—we’re committed to our students understanding that sex, gender, race, class, and sexuality have a history and change over time—but in a time of intense enrollment scrutiny the fact that it enrolled only WGST majors and seldom students from other fields was problematic. Each time we offered it we had to explain to the dean’s office why it had to run with only six or seven students. We decided to replace this single “history of thought” course with two courses that would have similar learning outcomes, but would crosslist in English and other fields and would, we believed, draw more students.

I teach at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast where, since 2008, there has been limited faculty hiring and much more intense concern about efficient use of existing resources in the college. At the moment when I developed this course, the English department, where I am jointly appointed, had lost several faculty members who had not (and still have not) been replaced; my WGST colleague, the only other faculty member with a WGST appointment, had moved into administration and had stopped teaching in the WGST program and had also not, at that point, been replaced. By developing two new courses to replace the “history of thought” course, I was able to contribute to the curricular needs of the English department and to diversify the offerings in WGST as well as to address the enrollment questions around the original core course. Filming American Feminisms and the other replacement course I developed, Sexuality and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, are now offered in alternate years and routinely overenroll at their twenty- or twenty-five-student caps.

Filming American Feminisms is an upper-level course organized decade-by-decade from 1900 to 2000. As the title suggests, it focuses exclusively on US material. As I will explain in more detail below, the course interweaves the parallel histories of American women and feminism, American film, the US film industry and its technologies, and US culture more broadly with the objective of pushing students to think historically and to understand gender, race, class, and sexuality and the ideologies surrounding them as shifting, contextual, and contingent. In this essay, after laying out the course structure and organization, the assignments, and some of the choices I made as I designed the course, I will explore the pedagogical opportunities and critical insights that emerged from such a structure of intertwined histories. When I decided on the decade-by-decade structure, I didn’t fully realize how generative of conversations and connections it would be. I hope that a few vignettes of class moments and some examples of student projects where these threads came together in productive ways will give a sense of why and how this course works. With multiple histories and approaches in play, this was perhaps the most complicated course intellectually I have ever...