Pat Gill

patgill@uiuc.edu

Research Associate Professor of Communications

Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies

Primary areas of interest: film theory; psychoanalytic theory and interpretation; feminist theory and gender studies; cultural studies and studies of popular culture; critical and interpretive theories.

Professor Gill explores the interpretive and affective force of written and visual media, especially that of popular films, investigating the reasons why audiences find film entertaining and how films entertain. Employing psychoanalytic concepts of human understanding as well as discursive theories about the ways in which meaning is formed, she studies visual language and narrative to consider the social and psychological implications of the industrial production of pleasure. Her courses in film, media, and cultural studies examine the ways in which the media can be seen to construct as well as to be constructed by reigning conceptions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. In bringing contemporary interpretive theories to bear on media constructions, images, and responses, Professor Gill analyzes the cultural assumptions informing each production, the cryptic, accepted allusions to a knowledge not within the frame of the picture that allows comprehension of a scene or the determination of a meaning.
Professor Gill has written on feminism, film, families, and filth. In Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, she used French psychoanalytic theory to look at the form and function of satire, and in Illicit Sex, which she co-edited with Thomas DiPiero, she compared a "pathetic" drama of late seventeenth-century England to American film noir. Her more recent work concerns the construction of masculinity, the manipulation of class positions, and the relation between interpretation and justice in certain contemporary films.

Ph.D. English, Cornell University