230269 Reel History & Her Story: Gendered Violence on Screen (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

The seminar is premised on feminist interventions and explores gendered violence on screen (cinema, television, and digital media) from a feminist perspective. We will consider whether and how visual storytelling and cinematic techniques represent, re-frame, normalize, or challenge the male gaze, masculine aesthetics, phallogocentricism, rape culture, the myth of the passive victim, etc. We will start off by considering the following questions: does the herstory of women´s experiences surface against dominant representation/reel history? If so how, on whose terms, and to what effect? Can camera positioning construct a certain type of meaning, and does representation suspend violence through repetitions, implicating audiences as spect-actors? How do feminist interventions subvert both the silencing and entertainment of gendered violence on screen? Please note that we will view and discuss explicit content (femicide, rape, sexual assault, non-consensual sexual acts, etc). The movies might provoke discussions around abuse and sexual trauma; many of the films on the syllabus also depict and/or allude to violence and murder; paedophilia and torture, racism and bigotry, gaslighting and psychological manipulation, as well as distressing themes: death, grief, rage, cancer, alcoholism.