C.G. Branch - Gender and Narrative
C.G. is currently a PhD student in American Studies at Boston University. Their interdisciplinary scholarship interrogates the politics of sensuality as a site of cultural production, bodily governance, and affective resistance within the context of the American empire. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist and queer thought, performance studies, and disability studies, C.G.’s work explores how sensuality functions as both a mode of state regulation and a terrain for insurgent world-making.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies C111E: Harlem Renaissance
English 174: Literature and History of the Seventies
Gender and Women’s Studies 104: Feminist Theory
American Studies 110: American Media and Culture Since World War II
Gender and Women’s Studies C146A: Representations of Sexuality in Literature
Art History 192G: Berkeley’s Built Environment: a Writing-intensive Seminar
Gender and Women’s Studies 130AC: Gender, Race, Nation, and Health
Thesis
Silver Screen Sex Work: The Spectacular Mythology of “Prostitution” in 1960s American Cinema
This thesis examines how early 1960s Hollywood films—BUtterfield 8 (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962)—construct and circulate the “prostitute imaginary” through gendered discourse, star power, and literary adaptation. Drawing on feminist film semiotics, historical analysis, and star studies, it argues that these films function as forms of public pedagogy, shaping cultural understandings of sex, femininity, and morality during a moment of Cold War-era social tension.
