Posted: December 8th, 2015

Apparatus theory has been criticized for leaving out the subject in their understanding of the cinema. Scholars including Gunning(“An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film

Apparatus theory has been criticized for leaving out the subject in their understanding of the cinema. Scholars including Gunning(“An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator, 736 – 750), Modelski(“The Master’s Dollhouse: Rear Window,” 723-735),
Hansen(“The Master’s Dollhouse: Rear Window,” 723-735),
and Diawara(“Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” 767-775) have convincingly reinserted alternative subjective models to undermine the technologically determined characterization of the medium, which presupposed the psychological disposition of the spectator. For this paper, analyze Some Like It Hot on both the narrative and formal level through either the feminist (Mulvey[“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 711-722], Doane[“Film and the Masquerade,” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism], and Silverman[“Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” 309-327, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism]) or queer (Kanno[“Queering the Deal: On the Road with Hope and Crosby,” 23-45] and Cohan[“Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke,” 283-303]) lens as you revise apparatus theory using Modelski or Hansen. How does the gaze operate in the film, and how are gender positions allocated, policed, and transgressed? Make sure to engage some of the writings we covered in class on this topic as you trace the vicissitudes of queering and hetero-normative desire of the text and reception.
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