Faculty
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
BA, University of Pennsylvania. PhD, University of Chicago. Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and a scholar of queer and trans film, digital media, and literature, focusing especially on the history of sexual science, pornography, and the formation of identity through mediation. He is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Gender of Gay Men: Identification, Sexual Cultures, and the Afterlives of the Inversion Model. At the University of Chicago and at SLC, he has taught courses on queer and trans media, sexual representation, affect studies, activism, and science in culture. His scholarship can be found in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Porn Studies, and the volume The Sex Scene: Space, Place, Industry (University of Edinburgh Press), along with review writing in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Critical Inquiry, Chicago Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. As a poet, his most recent book is Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022). SLC, 2026–
Previous Courses
Film History
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Open, Lecture—Fall
FLMH 2038
This course will analyze physical and embodied responses to aesthetic works, specifically framed by the concept of the “body genre” in film and literature. We will begin with Linda Williams’ original trifecta of filmic body genres—melodrama, horror, and pornography—and then we will open the category to other affect-driven genres such as slapstick, cringe, racial comedy, the sensation novel, disgust films, and shock media. Guided by the lessons of affect studies, audience studies, media studies, and genre theory, we will explore how aesthetic works call out to our bodies and how our bodies respond in sometimes unbidden ways.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall
FLMH 3149
How has so much of popular culture come to center around the image of the glamorous, talented, and terribly difficult woman we call “the diva”? And why is she constantly followed by throngs of queer fans who worship her every move, who have an encyclopedic knowledge of her work, and who practice becoming her? This course will track the construction of the diva as a site for the invention, regulation, and performance of gender and sexuality. Beginning with the Hollywood star system that brought us divas such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and the musical cultures that brought us Maria Callas and Aretha Franklin, we will then look to the cultures of fandom, worship, and imitation that surround them. Here, we will pay special attention to the role of queer cultures and drag performance in propelling and deconstructing divadom. Films such as The Beaver Trilogy, Paris Is Burning, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, alongside media and cross-gender performance like Lypsinka’s “Passion of the Crawford” and selections from the RuPaul’s Drag Race universe, will act as prisms through which we will explore the mix of individualism, allure, genius, and artifice that make up the diva’s image.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring
FLMH 3028
If Muybridge’s earliest film forms were made as scientific studies of animal and human movement, then science’s particular mode of observation may be thought of as foundational to film itself. This course will take science and film as two intricately entangled forms of looking at, recording, and analyzing phenomena. From experiments in film technology to the visions of science fiction filmmaking, from the history of documentaries on the social life of science to the now-constant outpouring of biopics of scientists like Oppenheimer, this course will explore how film and science inform and shape each other. Possible screenings include How to Survive a Plague, Mothlight, An Inconvenient Truth, Godzilla, and Seconds.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Spring
FLMH 2110
This course will focus on what transness, cinema, and the digital do to each other. How have the history of film and digital media changed through the innovations of trans directors, artists, and subjects? How has trans identity been shaped by film form and the expansion of the digital? How have trans communities and activists used film and digital media to shape the political and social realities that surround them? In this course, we will view major works by trans directors, explore complex representations of trans life in cinematic and digital works, and study a vast array of film and media studies scholarship on transness. Our syllabus will think comparatively about trans cinema and digital media across time periods, genres, genders, and nations, including taking other forms of difference like sexuality, race, and ability as active analytical questions which modify and are modified by gender. Students will gain familiarity and skill with questions on the politics of representation and the connections between transness, technology, and aesthetics.
Faculty