Hi!

Hello and welcome to SCREEN SEXUALITY.  This blog is my final project for Alicia Williamson's Representation & Sexuality course at the University of Pittsburgh.  In the following posts, I will be taking an in-depth look at how American films have depicted the intersectionality of race, sex, and politics in a way that reflects the time and place they were produced.  Movies covered will range from mainstream blockbusters to low-budget art films.  The focus of the content will generally pertain to the themes covered in class, but I also hope to touch upon important movements in the expression of sexuality in film, such as pornography, New Queer Cinema, and feminist film theory. Throughout these analyses, I will show that sexuality has played an instrumental role in the development of cinema as an art form in the United States.   As Foucault points out in his definitive work The History of Sexuality, the establishment of regulations on sexual expression developed in the Seventeenth century have not diminished but strengthened the amount of sexual content in artistry by proliferating the amount of content relating to sexual discourse. Societal perceptions on gender and racial expectations inevitably influence film through the action depicted on screen and the camera's gaze.  If we agree with Freud's view in his Three Essays of Sexuality that the act of looking itself is "a derivative of touching, and therefore, able to arouse desire by contiguity," then the cinema may be seen as a voyeuristic stage where desires and ideals of sexual construction are depicted.  This blog will highlight how dominant sexual discourses are constructed in both the explicit narrative and the mise en scene of the film's world.