Syllabus: Animating Resistance: The Subversive Art of Experimental Animation

Melissa Friedling, The New School

This experimental animation course embraces the lessons of feminist science studies for a feminist laboratory (proposed by Lori Emerson and Maya Livio, 2019) that pays attention to access, epistemology, care, hierarchy, labor, and the environment and suggests new modes of knowledge production that move away from solitary work and towards collaborative, experiential and interdisciplinary research. With a feminist spin on animation’s promise of transformation in the interest of justice, the syllabus, I hope, offers a model for a curriculum might cultivate care, proximity and closeness – an intimate curriculum premised on difference (I presented my case for this in a paper I delivered at the 2021 UFVA conference). By reading feminist, queer, critical race, decolonial, and disability studies alongside media and animation studies and screening creative exemplars, my aim was to prompt students to explore the possibilities for the animated image to subvert, disrupt, distort, destabilize and critique formulations of human and non-human; challenge categories of gender, sex, race, nature, nation, labor, and self; and breach boundaries of movement in time, and space.

Download a PDF of the syllabus.

Keywords: animation, experimental