Topics/Queer Theory

(4 Credits)

Black horror films have long served as aesthetic containers—assembling, disarming, reflecting, and refusing the horror of living while Black under the daily ruses of U.S. white supremacist terror. At the same time, their screenings double as intra-community gatherings: sites of camaraderie, laughter, stylized critique, and nuanced joy. This class is less about screening suspenseful Black horror than re/visiting canonic Black queer cinema through the lens of horror. From sound and score to script and psycho-somatic text, we will mine subtle terrors—where the exhaust of anti-Blackness lingers. Our work attends to what is displaced off screen yet hyper-visible in the frame; what remains unscripted yet choreographed across and against the Black body as moving image. To guide us, we turn to a congress of Black feminist scholars theorizing visual culture within Performance Studies—its methods, analytics, and world-making investments. After spending time with Nicole Fleetwood, Kara Keeling, and Kimberly Juanita Brown, how might we reorient affect and perception in the act of “seeing” the Black body? Staging a conversation between Tina Campt, Krista Thompson, and Meg Onli, what emerges at the intersection of aesthetic capture and collective improvisation? What insights, possibilities, and limits surface when Black queer horror is refracted through satire, musical, family drama, or the archive? Films include Blackula (1972), Vamp (1986), The Wiz (1978), Eve’s Bayou (1997), the archival work of Cheryl Dunye (1996—ongoing), Get Out (2017), and Swarm (2023). This course also centers the ritual of Black cinematic audience-ing as creative musculature—a Black feminist practice for building and sustaining counter-publics, especially during heightened moments of racist harm on the national stage. Assignments consist of workshopping a professional critical document (e.g., personal statement, artist statement, or syllabus) and a two-part final that inter-animates and distinguishes between intellectual inquiry and artistic (or felt) pursuit. The final, for example, may take the form of a polished, argument-driven paper alongside a creative component—such as a storyboard of an omitted scene from a (favorite or not) Black queer horror film.