In Constantine Giannaris’s 1998 film From The Edge of the City, the young and beautiful protagonist Sasha (Stathis Papadopoulos) ends up clashing with his family, setting him down a dark path of criminality, prostitution, and drug use. In the first video lecture, we are introduced to the setting of the film, the main characters motivations, […]

Pedro Almodovar’s Academy Award winning 1999 Spanish drama film All About My Mother is dedicated to his own mother in the closing credits, suggesting that the film is based upon his personal relationships. However, one may have already suspected this if they were really focusing on the meticulous direction and attention to detail of Almodovar that […]

In the reading Critically Queer, Judith Butler writes about the power of discourse, and the ability for power to act as discourse in spheres of performativity. Butler states that “the power of discourse to produce that which it names is thus essentially linked with the question of performativity. The performative is thus one domain in […]

In Queer Cinema in the World, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Gilt argue that queer cinema gives global film spectators alternative perspectives to heteronormative culture, history, and politics. In the reading, they write that  “queer cinema elaborates new accounts of the world, offering alternatives to embedded capitalist, National, hetero and homonormative maps; revising the flows and […]

In the first week of this course I found the readings insightful and thought-provoking in matters of queer identity, heteronormativity and the perpetuation and acceptance of a binary organization of gender and sexualities by both heterosexual and queer human participants. In the Queer Studies Introduction reading it states that “sexuality is at once constituted by […]