Queer cinema at wellesley: does it exist?
Wellesley has boasted a welcoming environment for queer students for years, but does their engagement with cinema on campus live up to that statement?
The study of queerness and it’s interaction with media academically began at Wellesley in the mid-1990s with the teaching of an English department course titled “New Literatures: Gay and Lesbian Fiction in America”. But, queer film/TV studies on campus would not occur until the 2008-2009 academic year with a course on Television partially covering shows dealing with gender and sexuality.
Wellesley’s Cinema and Media Studies department was not fully formed until after the start of the new millenia, even though students had been engaging with film in social settings since the early to mid 1900s. Regarding Wellesley being a historically women’s college, it naturally has a large queer population that continued to grow as time went on. Therefore, Wellesley students and faculty began to engage with queer media in many ways.
The first course explicitly taught on queer media began in the mid-1990s, with the course “New Literatures: Lesbian and Gay Fiction in America”, as previously mentioned, but did not deal with film or television’s intersection with queerness. Since the CAMS department was not officially formed until 2000, the courses offered on film were extra-departmental. Students could take classes offered at MIT that revolved around cinema, but there was not a formal department on campus that gave students the opportunity to study cinema critically. Therefore, there was no place for students looking to engage with cinema.
Surely there would be a population on campus of students who chose to screen queer movies and shows on their own time without documentation, but this would not be visible in the Archives.
Upon the creation of a formal office for LGBT+ students on campus, there were now resources specifically designed by and for queer Wellesley students. The office, now run by AJ Guerrero, holds events with for queer students on campus of varying identities and sexualities.
When you open the LGBTQ+ services page on the Wellesley website, it even publicizes that “[a]ny student may choose to take courses like the Cinema and Media Studies Department’s Contemporary Queer Cinema”, which was offered in the 2011-2012 academic year, but has not been offered since. The department has also offered a course titled “Desiring Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Cinema” in the 2011-2012 academic year, but it has not been offered since the 2014-2015 year. Furthermore, none of the core CAMS courses required for the major are specifically about queer cinema, though some have a section of their coursework dedicated to discussions on gender and sexuality in cinema.
What we have noticed in our research of queer cinema at Wellesley is mostly how lacking departments are in their versatility of courses that deal with queerness. In the same way that students from varying backgrounds wish to study their cultures and engage with their identity in critical ways, queer students have the same desire. As the faculty and student population at Wellesley continues to change and become more diverse, the course listings will hopefully follow suit.
Wellesley has currently one openly transgender tenured faculty member, who teaches in the Music department: Professor Goldschmitt, who has published writings on the relationship between queerness, film, and music specifically in films such as Moonlight. When prompted on if he would teach more classes on queer media and its intersection with music, Professor Goldschmitt stated that because of the lack of faculty in the department and because of the course load he has to keep up with each year, it is hard to find time and space for these classes to do them justice.
To focus more on student endeavors, the Wellesley Film Society has a history of student-chosen screenings dating back to the 1960s. The showing schedule would be posted in the Wellesley News for any students or guests to come to (more on the Film Society can be read on the page focusing on the history of the Film Society at Wellesley). Though the showings date back fifty or so years, primarily the last four active seasons (2016-19) have included queer-friendly movie nights, showing films such as Frida (2002) and Thelma and Louise (1991).
The pandemic had an effect on the relationship of screenings to on-campus social life, due to the lack of public gatherings. The Office of Student Involvement held outdoor movie nights, but primarily to show movies pertaining to a holiday, such as Halloweentown or Coco. In a world where the campus is becoming more open to larger student gatherings, the screenings have begun to return.