Instructor:
This class considers how difference and otherness have been embodied and enacted dramatically, cinematically, and visually across time. We will consider questions like how has otherness been understood throughout history? What ideas, actions, and methodologies have shaped cultural and social understandings of gender, race, and sexuality? How have these representations impacted our world and society? In an attempt to answer and decipher these questions, Enacting Difference turns to the theatrical and visual arts in exploring how otherness in all of its myriad forms has been defined and challenged throughout history. We will focus on how playwrights, directors, and actors have given shape to, subverted, and explored what it means to be different. In the process, this course will consider enactment as both an acting out and perpetuation of gendered, racial, and sexual stereotypes and a reclamation and dismantling of these very same tropes. Throughout the course students will also engage with a number of dramatic and cinematic genres from comedy, satire, and melodrama to musicals and tragedies.