When and why did fascism first emerge? What social and political problems did it claim to address? Where did its ideas come from? And how did cinema help transform those ideas into powerful images that shaped both the Italian fascist regime and its political afterlives? To address these questions, this course explores how Italian fascism has been imagined and contested through cinema from its inception in 1920s Italy to the present. Italy was the political laboratory in which fascism was first invented—both as a term and as a political experiment—before becoming a global model of authoritarian power. Moving from the historical emergence of fascism in the wake of World War I to its cinematic articulation in propaganda films and newsreels of the 1920s, the course analyzes how cinema functioned as a laboratory in which fascism was aestheticized and rendered politically legible across the twentieth century.
The films studied range from fascist-era propaganda films such as Scipio The African (Gallone, 1937) and neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945) to the provocative art cinema of the 1970s, including works by Bertolucci, Cavani, and Pasolini, as well as contemporary films that revisit and reconfigure the legacy of fascism. The course approaches these films through multiple critical lenses, including gender and sexuality, race, class and nationalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Through close analysis of films, political manifestos, and historical documents, students will investigate how images produce consent and why the visual language of fascism remains a potent tool of political imaginaries in the digital age.

This class examines queer phenomena in and around China, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the queer Sinophone world more generally. Beyond seeking to understand sexual subcultures and sites of queer intimacies on their own terms, the course examines their relationship to political economy and geopolitics. In addition to filmic and literary texts, the course includes readings that are theoretical, anthropological, sociological, and comparative. While the focus is largely on modern China, the class also attends to historical reference points both inside and outside the Sinophone world. From a macro perspective, this course examines China’s place in discourses of development, focusing on the role of desire in constituting the sexual and political subject of modernity. The overall goal of this class is to develop alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between sexuality and politics. The course does not require specialized knowledge of China.

This course will examine how statutory law, court decisions and other forms of social policy encourage or discourage various forms of sexuality, reproduction and parenting. Such issues as contraception, abortion, gay and lesbian rights, reproductive technology, family violence, and welfare and family policies will be covered.

This course explores theories, debates, and frameworks in African American popular culture. Drawing on Africana, Gender and Sexuality, Communications and Performance Studies, it examines histories of Black representation across a number of performance forms. Television, film, dance, theater, music and more will be explored to interrogate the ways blackness has been defined, framed, and disseminated. What are the micro-politics through which racial difference is produced? How have Black people redefined and wrestled with questions of authenticity and "the real"? What are the capacities and the limits of popular culture to both render and shape Black life? In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the creative labor that Black people produce, and the processes of racialization produced through Black bodies.

This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

A creative writing workshop devoted to the art of documentary forms. Assignments may include working with found materials; research, observation and reportage; documentary work in literary and art genres; and learning from documentary film. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.

This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.