Film Scholar Linda Williams Joins Center for Ethics Programming
The Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics welcomes Linda Williams for her talk, “Sex is Too Important To Be Left to the Pornographers,” on Monday, January 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall.
Friday, January 24, 2014 10:50 AM
This event, co-sponsored by the Film Studies program, is free and open to the public.
Williams, professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley, teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has also recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Bunuel, eastern and western forms of melodrama, film theory, selected “sex genres,” and The Wire.
Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993) and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Christine Gledhill, 2000). In 1989 she published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). This study of moving-image pornography looks seriously at the history and form of an enormously popular genre. In 2001 Williams published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton)–an analysis of racial melodrama spanning the 19th and 20th centuries of American culture. She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, 2004). Her most recent book is Screening Sex (Duke, 2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies.
This lecture is part of the Center for Ethic’s Sex, Ethics, and Pleasure Politics, a series of special events and thematic lectures that aims to develop a comprehensive sexual ethics for the campus community. This lecture is free and open to the public. For more series information, visit the Center for Ethics website.
