ENG 3600-0002 - Fall 2026 - Welch

This course investigates femininity as performance in Hollywood cinema. Across genres and eras, the American screen has given us unforgettable stars, glamorous divas, melodramatic heroines, monstrous mothers, scheming villains, and camp icons. What makes these performances so powerful? And why do certain feminine figures inspire both devotion and anxiety? Drawing on theories of gender performativity, stardom, melodrama, and camp, we will analyze how actresses craft persona through voice, gesture, costume, and affect—and how the industry shapes, commodifies, and sometimes punishes feminine charisma. We will consider the diva as spectacle, the villainess as transgression, and the queen as a figure of excess and authority. The course will move from classical Hollywood star vehicles to contemporary films that interrogate fame, ambition, aging, and power. Along the way, we will ask how race, sexuality, gender identity, and class complicate dominant models of femininity, and why certain performances resonate so deeply within queer fan cultures. Through close viewing and critical analysis, students will examine Hollywood not simply as storytelling, but as a laboratory for staging gender itself. Fulfills LMC requirement for Understanding Genres. Counts towards Film Studies minor.