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Flipping the Switch on Heteronormativity

A Cultural Studies Class Enters the Twilight Zone

Watch the Film

 

Behind-the-Scenes Photos

In this lesson, communication theory and production students team up to create “Straightforward,” a short film about a world where gay rights are the norm, straight rights are deviant, and a cultural studies professor with a mysterious past challenges his class to question their assumptions about sexuality, gender roles, and the nature of morality.

 

Course Information: 

Course: COM 443 - Communication and Cultural Studies

Semester: Spring 2015

Professor: Christopher Boulton, Assistant Professor

Department: Communication, Film

School: University of Tampa

 

Learning Objectives: 

  • To use cultural studies to question the inevitability or “natural nature” of “common sense” in society

  • To recognize how ideology is just a story we tell ourselves about power relations

  • To experience how cultural hegemony might be structured differently

 

Assignment: 

I worked with the film students outside of class to conceptualize the alternate “twilight zone” world and write the script. We then did a few read-throughs with the entire class before removing the scripts and distributing topic cards so students wouldn’t have to memorize lines. After all, they weren’t actors! Instead, we shot the classroom scenes in chunks, using improvised lines that the students put in their own words for a more natural feel.

 

Assessments: 

As an in-class activity, I did not grade this assignment. But I did show the final, edited version of the film in class and facilitated a discussion about the students’ reactions—both to the process of making it and the end result—before prompting them to write a short reflection connecting the film to one of three quotes that evoke the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies’ critical perspective on power relations in society.  

 

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

 

Comments: 

This is the most unusual class I’ve ever taught. I was pleased by how the experience bonded the class and led to many hilarious out-takes. More importantly, it challenged them to question how culture is only one ideological explanation for the natural order of things. For example, by constructing an alternative system for gender roles, based on the Bible, that condemned the traditional nuclear family, the exercise demonstrated that the structure of society is not inevitable, but rather the result of an ongoing ideological struggle over the natural order of things. If I were to do it again, I might do it over two class periods to give students time to rehearse on their own time and perhaps try to prevent the need to repeat takes, which led to some down-time and redundancy of content.

 

 

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