BA English Language and English Literature / Course details

The unit aims to:

• To locate the work of Tilda Swinton over the last 40 years within changing cultural, historical and political contexts

• To enable students to read Swinton’s work through the lens of feminist and queer theorists, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Mary Ann Doane and Richard Dyer.  

• To evaluate the shifting boundaries between experimental forms and popular culture via the ways in which Swinton’s worked has crossed between them.

• To encourage and enable students to engage with creative audio-visual practices, as a method of exploring the connections between cultural theories and forms.

• To provide opportunities for students to imagine, view, model connections between critical thinking, socially and political engagement and creative practices. 

The critical and creative outputs will enable students to enhance and demonstrate the following (employable) skills:

creative thinking;  

close reading of cultural texts;

writing for different audiences;  

critical evaluation and assessment;  

presentational skills, including audio-visual material;  

understanding of feminist and queer theories;  

familiarity with, and ability to use competing frameworks to read different cultural forms: film, live performance and arts activism;

time-management;

collaboration;

ability to appreciate and understand key concepts in critical practice, including: affect, whiteness, queering genre, the masquerade. 

Block 1 (3 weeks) Off-Gender

This section of the course will examine Swinton’s performance of gender and sexuality through an analysis of feminist and queer theories of transgression and masquerade. Engaging with critical texts in feminist and queer theory (B. Ruby Rich, Judith Butler, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Mary Ann Doane and Lizbeth Goodman) this section of the course will introduce students to debates about gendered narratives, sexual performativities and constructions of femininity and masculinity as genre and myth.

Films include: Orlando, Female Perversions (see also Man to Man).

Block 2 (3 weeks) Whiteness and Otherworldliness

This second section of the course will examine Swinton’s pale whiteness in relation to her capacity to embody the non-human, the technological and the animal, as well as the mythical and the transcendent. We shall discuss Richard Dyer’s book White and think about Swinton’s whiteness in various different cultural representations: music video, film and live performance art. An important focus will also be the ‘whitewashing debates’ around her role in Dr Strange. We’ll engage with critical readings that emphasise the ‘otherworldliness’ of her performances (Amelia Jones, Lisa Tickner and Mignon Nixon), and explore how styles of performance are embedded in changing modes of technological and artistic mediation.

Films/video include: The Stars (are out tonight); Dr Strange; Only Lovers Left Alive; The Maybe; The Chronicles of Narnia; (see also Constantine)

Block 3 (3 weeks) Affect and Interiority

This third block of the course will approach Swinton’s work in relation to popular myths and fantasies about the woman’s body as the site of sensation and emotionality. In dialogue with the debates about the history of women’s genres (such as the maternal melodrama) in mainstream cinema, we shall examine the place of feminised affect and interiority in Swinton’s work. Read through current queer and feminist debates about affect (Ann Cvetkovich and Robyn Wiegman) and its flatness (Lauren Berlant) and about paranoid and reparative reading practices (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), this block of the course will examine Swinton’s performance styles in relation to affect or its flatness, and the implications for an imagined feminine emotional interiority that has been long debated in feminist film theory. This part of the course will also look at cultural theories of mediated affect (such as by Marie-Luise Angerer and Marsha Kinder) to explore the tensions between the liveness and apparent authenticity of Swinton’s performances and her styles of artifice and imitation in her digital and genetic embodiments on the cinema screen.

Films include: The Deep End, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Teknolust; see also: Thumbsucker, I am Love.

Closing Session: (1 week): Collaborations and Contexts  

(with directors, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Lynne Hershman-Leeson, and with film critic and festival curator, Mark Cousins)

This final part of the course emphasises Swinton’s collaborations and shared interventions. Taking case studies of her collaborative work (in particular, with Derek Jarman in his experimental films and with Mark Cousins on ‘The Pilgrimage’ and ‘The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams’) this session will explore collaborative cultural practices and test new models for reading Swinton beyond conventional star or celebrity studies.

Films include: Derek; The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger.

Final Student Presentations (1 week) 

WEEKLY:  

1-hour lecture

2-hour seminar/ workshop

Materials will all be on Blackboard/ e-library week-by-week, including essential and recommended reading, weblinks, viewings where available.  
 

 Demonstrate a critical understanding of Tilda Swinton’s works across a range of genres (film, video, live performance, arts activism)

Show familiarity with and confidence using a range of theory appropriate to the subject of intertextual transmission, appropriation and adaptation

Show critical understanding of contemporary feminist and queer re-visioning of conventional forms.

Show nuanced understanding of how political and ideological regimes construct conventional figurations of gender, sexuality and whiteness 

Demonstrate critical and creative understanding of the cultural placing of the work of Tilda Swinton from 1980-2025, including her collaborations with other key independent artists and filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman and Pedro Almadovar.  

Write and speak for appropriate and different audiences

Demonstrate an ability to understand how texts and their reception change through time

Synthesise theoretical material and apply to new readings of texts 

Plan and complete independent research work on chosen topic

Produce high-quality written outputs appropriate to genre and audience

Use ‘workshopping’ of ideas in a collaborative way in class

Develop ‘creative’ outputs relating to critical material 

Ability to use writing and thinking skills in ‘real world’ scenarios

Produce writing to specific audiences and to specific deadlines

Research historical and contextual material and synthesise for contemporary audience

• oral feedback on individual presentations
• written feedback on research presentation
• written feedback on extended essay
• additional one-to-one feedback (during the consultation hour or by making an appointment)

West, Dennis, and Joan M. West, 'Achieving a State of Limitlessness: An Interview with Tilda  

Swinton', Cineaste, 20, (1993), 18-21

Swinton, Tilda, 'Film: State of Cinema Address: 49th San Francisco International

Film Festival, 29 April 2006', Critical Quarterly, 48 (2006), 110-20

Brabazon, Tara, 'Reading Tilda: A Swinton Guide through Bodily Textualisation',

        Social Semiotics, 4:1-2 (1994), 9-30

Swinton, Tilda, ‘Interview with Actress Tilda Swinton: ‘I am probably a woman’,’ Interview by

Vera von Kreutzbruck, The Wip, March 20, 2009 http://thewip.net/2009/03/20/interview-with-actress-tilda-swinton-i-am-probably-a-woman/

Wood, Jason, ‘Tilda Swinton’, in Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema (London

            and New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 140-45

Druick, Zoë, 'On Female Perversions: A Conversation with Susan Streitfeld', Tessera 23 (1997), 107-110

Bainbridge, Caroline, ‘Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin’ in A  

           Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke and New York:  

          Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 77-98

Doane, Mary Ann, 'Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator', in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 17-32

Butler, Judith, 'Lacan, Riviere and Strategies of Masquerade', in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics edn. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006 [1990]), pp. 59-77 [in 1990 edition, pp. 43-57]

Butler, Judith, 'Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions', in Gender Trouble, pp. 175-93  

           [in 1990 edition, pp. 128-141]

Angerer, Marie-Luise, 'Affective Troubles in Media and Art', in Desire after Affect (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,  

         or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You', in Touching  

          Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),      

          pp. 123-151

Dyer, Richard, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)