Week’s topic: Dreams

Week’s Reading: (uploaded files)

Read: Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred; Bennett, Juda, “Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes” (Biography 2000 23.4)

Screening: Julien, Isaac, Looking for Langston (1988; available via Kanopy); Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied (1989; available via Kanopy)

I have an outline and a feedback. (need correction,uploaded)

Please have a look and have a sense of what is looking for, need adjust to the feedback, cuz the score of the outline is 86/100. 

Feedback from teacher: RE: your introductory topic, I think it’s less that homosexual desire is beginning to appear more in a thus more confused society, and more the case that the configurations of power that disciplined homosexuality as marginal, a threat to be confined, are losing their force. There’s nothing new about same-sex couples, but there is something happening in the sense that same-sex couples are less seen as targets of policing, medical confinement, etc.

Is technology part of the reason? You are arguing that it is, but I think you would have to say a bit more about this: it seems that communication technologies or technologies of representation are being liberalized such that same-sex subjects have more ability to voice their experiences and to communicate those experiences broadly. But there were networks of people who used to exchange, for example, erotic same-sex photographs, using the mail system. So technologies of communication might be part, but not all, of the reason.

I’m not sure that the biggest-selling artists are working primarily with sexual materials, so I”m not sure the use of art is the reason as such. Also, in this class, “aesthetics” refers to experience of sense and sensation, before it refers to the study of art works.

Barbara Hammer would say that it is lesbians  and other queer people fighting for their rights that produced these changes. For her, it was important to make films about lesbians – more important that to watch films like The Crying Game.

I think, then, that your topic is still much too broad, and that you should identify a key artwork from our course materials, and 3 articles from the course readings, in which to ground your paper.