Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton: Feminist and Queer Readings of Cinema, Politics and Culture

ENGL31241 Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton: Feminist and Queer Readings of Cinema, Politics and Culture 20 Semester 1 Undergraduate Level 3 Jacqueline Stacey Unit coordinator English and American Studies 1 FHEQ level (Framework for Higher Education Qualifications) ' Last part of a Bachelors ' European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System Rating : 10.0 Tracking her work across cinema, live art and the wider arena of cultural politics from the mid-1980s onwards, this course will offer a critical engagement with the work of Tilda Swinton: actor, producer, writer, performer and cultural activist. Through an interdisciplinary framework which combines textual, theoretical and historical approaches, this course will look at how Swinton’s work has crossed the borders between art, live performance and film, as well as between experimental and popular form. Our sessions will examine the ways in which her style and image have crossed the boundaries of ascribed gender and sexual categories. The course will draw extensively on feminist and queer theory and offer opportunities for close textual readings and some (optional) creative videographic work as part of the final assessment.    The unit aims to: • To locate the work of Tilda Swinton over the last 40 years within changing cultural, historical and political contexts• To enable students to read Swinton’s work through the lens of feminist and queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane and Richard Dyer.  • To evaluate the shifting boundaries between experimental forms and popular culture via the ways in which Swinton’s worked has crossed between them.• To encourage and enable students to engage with creative audio-visual practices, as a method of exploring the connections between cultural theories and forms.• To provide opportunities for students to imagine, view, model connections between critical thinking, socially and political engagement and creative practices.  The critical and creative outputs will enable students to enhance and demonstrate the following (employable) skills: creative thinking;  close reading of cultural texts;writing for different audiences;  critical evaluation and assessment;  presentational skills, including audio-visual material;  understanding of feminist and queer theories;  familiarity with, and ability to use competing frameworks to read different cultural forms: film, live performance and arts activism;time-management;collaboration;ability to appreciate and understand key concepts in critical practice, including: affect, whiteness, queering genre, the masquerade.   Demonstrate a critical understanding of Tilda Swinton’s works across a range of genres (film, video, live performance, arts activism)Show familiarity with and confidence using a range of theory appropriate to the subject of intertextual transmission, appropriation and adaptationShow critical understanding of contemporary feminist and queer re-visioning of conventional forms.Show nuanced understanding of how political and ideological regimes construct conventional figurations of gender, sexuality and whiteness  Demonstrate critical and creative understanding of the cultural placing of the work of Tilda Swinton from 1980-2025, including her collaborations with other key independent artists and filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman and Pedro Almadovar.  Write and speak for appropriate and different audiencesDemonstrate an ability to understand how texts and their reception change through timeSynthesise theoretical material and apply to new readings of texts  Plan and complete independent research work on chosen topicProduce high-quality written outputs appropriate to genre and audienceUse ‘workshopping’ of ideas in a collaborative way in classDevelop ‘creative’ outputs relating to critical material  Ability to use writing and thinking skills in ‘real world’ scenariosProduce writing to specific audiences and to specific deadlinesResearch historical and contextual material and synthesise for contemporary audience  WEEKLY:  1-hour lecture2-hour seminar/ workshop Materials will all be on Blackboard/ e-library week-by-week, including essential and recommended reading, weblinks, viewings where available.     0 Other 20% 2 Written assignment (inc essay) 80% <ul> <li> oral feedback on individual presentations</li> <li> written feedback on research presentation</li> <li> written feedback on extended essay</li> <li> additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment)</li> </ul> N  West, Dennis, and Joan M. West, 'Achieving a State of Limitlessness: An Interview with Tilda  Swinton', Cineaste, 20, (1993), 18-21Swinton, Tilda, 'Film: State of Cinema Address: 49th San Francisco InternationalFilm Festival, 29 April 2006', Critical Quarterly, 48 (2006), 110-20Brabazon, Tara, 'Reading Tilda: A Swinton Guide through Bodily Textualisation',        Social Semiotics, 4:1-2 (1994), 9-30Swinton, Tilda, ‘Interview with Actress Tilda Swinton: ‘I am probably a woman’,’ Interview byVera von Kreutzbruck, The Wip, March 20, 2009 http://thewip.net/2009/03/20/interview-with-actress-tilda-swinton-i-am-probably-a-woman/Wood, Jason, ‘Tilda Swinton’, in Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema (London            and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 140-45Druick, Zoë, 'On Female Perversions: A Conversation with Susan Streitfeld', Tessera 23 (1997), 107-110Bainbridge, Caroline, ‘Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin’ in A             Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke and New York:            Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 77-98Doane, Mary Ann, 'Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator', in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 17-32Butler, Judith, 'Lacan, Riviere and Strategies of Masquerade', in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006 [1990]), pp. 59-77 [in 1990 edition, pp. 43-57]Butler, Judith, 'Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions', in Gender Trouble, pp. 175-93             [in 1990 edition, pp. 128-141]Angerer, Marie-Luise, 'Affective Troubles in Media and Art', in Desire after Affect (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,           or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You', in Touching            Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),                pp. 123-151Dyer, Richard, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)  Lectures 11 Seminars 22 0 150.5