This course will analyze two important film genres, melodrama and horror, through the lens of contemporary cultural theories of gender, race, and sexuality.  Topics of particular interest will include: feminist analyses of gender and genre; racial difference and studies of "whiteness"; normative and alternative sexualities; identification and spectatorship; recent revisions of genre. Directors may include Cronenberg, Dash, Haynes, Hitchcock, Onwurah, Polanski, Ray, Romero, Sirk, Vidor, and Whale.

One seminar meeting and one screening per week.