This course aims to provide students with an understanding of how cinema and culture ‘construct’ ideas about gender and sexuality and of how these ideas become meaningful to audiences through media representations.We will examine some of the narrative and aesthetic procedures that have been used to construct different forms of masculinity and femininity by considering, for example, questions of genre, point of view and mise en scène. The course has also the objective of exploring some of the ways in which Italian cinema, throughout its history, has repeatedly made use of ideas about masculinity, femininity and sexual deviance as crucial components in the articulation of discourses about the nation and its socio-political lacerations.