Course Description:
This special topics course is devoted to the study of exploitation cinema. The focus here will be on its subgenres' varying modes of social and political engagement. On the one hand, these politics tend to be conspicuous in their effort to challenge such issues as censorship or racism. On the other hand, the ideological implications of this profuse and multifarious genre require more investigation--its politics are anything but stagnant. How has exploitation cinema as a cult phenomenon undergone processes of renegotiation, reconsideration, re-appropriation, and re-application throughout the past century of filmmaking and film going? In what ways have spectators, especially minoritized ones, molded their meanings to accommodate their pleasures and critiques of hegemonic strongholds?
This course will explore these questions through the theories of genre, race, spectatorship, gender and sexuality. By and large, the class will go in chronological order, starting with the "social problem" film of the 1910s and ending with the contemporary work of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Anna Biller. Along the way, historical readings will be paired with texts that rethink the bounds of genre, intertextuality, reparativity, desire, and taste. Subgenres of study will include blaxploitation, sexploitation, rape revenge, Mexploitation and horror.