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This course aims to provide students with an understanding of how cinema and other medias ‘construct’ expectations about masculinity and femininity and ideas about normal and deviant sexualities. The course will encourage students to reflect on the multiple axes of privilege, exclusion and inclusion within the production and consumption of media culture. The course explores some of the ways in which Italian cinema and media have made use of ideas about gender and sexuality as crucial components in the articulation of discourses about the nation, the family and the couple.

The term Neorealism refers to a set of films made in Italy at the end of World War 2. This was a time when the country was in ruins and the Italian film industry was on its knees: the main film studios in Rome (Cinecittà) had been expropriated and turned into refuge camps; equipment to shoot films was extremely hard to find and electrical power supply was very limited. Rather than making film production impossible, these obstacles actually instigated the emergence of a new way of making films.

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.