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Richard Dyer (born 1945) is an English academic who held a professorship in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. Specialising in cinema (particularly Italian cinema), queer theory, and the relationship between entertainment and representations of race, sexuality, and gender, he was previously a faculty member of the Film Studies Department at the University of Warwick for many years and has held a number of visiting professorships in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Retrieved 10 September 2013.
Before coming to King's College London in 2006, he was a professor of film studies at the University of Warwick and a visiting professor at the following institutions: University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications in 1985; the Istituto Universitario Orientale in 1987; Stockholm University in 1996, 2006, and 2010; the University of Copenhagen in 2002; New York University in 2003; the University of Bergamo in 2004; Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar in 2009; the University of St. Andrews in 2011. Throughout his career, he has taught courses on race and ethnicity, film, stardom, Hollywood, Italian cinema, Federico Fellini, and representation. He was also very involved in graduate education, and supervised dissertations on subjects ranging from the history of gay cinema during the 1970s to experimental animation. Having already published widely on whiteness, film, and lesbian and gay cultures, Dyer published journal articles and book chapters on song in Italian cinema and whiteness in the film, Dirty Dancing.
A central element of his argument is the intra-racial boundary work among whites. Gender and class create a hierarchy among whites, wherein women are read as whiter ("purer") than men and those of a higher class status are whiter than the lower classes.Dyer, Richard W. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. page 51 The third chapter, "The Light of the World", is particularly important to this intra-racial boundary work in that it examines the relationship between beauty and whiteness and how white women are visually presented as whiter than their male counterparts through the use of light.Dyer, Richard W. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. page 122 Dyer is in conversation with scholars such as David Roediger (author of The Wages of Whiteness, 1991), Tamsin Wilton (author of Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image, 1995) and Susan Jeffords (author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, 1994); and is therefore contributing to whiteness studies, film studies, and gender/sexuality studies.
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (1986) continues Dyer's extensive contribution to star studies. Judy Garland, Paul Robeson, and Marilyn Monroe are the subjects of this text, and yet they are not what Dyer is most interested in. Instead, Dyer looks closely at the ways in which audiences simultaneously construct and consume a particular star's persona, in the process debunking common stereotypes about Garland, Monroe, and Robeson.Hunter, I.Q. Review of Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, by Richard Dyer. Journal of American Studies, 22.2(1988), 285.
In his 2001 The Culture of Queers, Dyer unpacks the oversimplified term "queer", arguing that it is a sexual identity not merely about specific sexual activities, but defines men who are attracted to other men and who possess other non-sexual attributes like being effeminate or hyper-masculine. Analysing films genres like film noir and queer actors like Rock Hudson, Dyer frames the trajectory of queer identification and culture with two major historical moments: the first use of the term "homosexual" in 1869 and the Stonewall Riots. Although well received within the academic community, some scholars have criticised the absence of lesbianism in Dyer's definitions and delineation of queer cultural history.Finlay, Sarah-Jane. Review of The Culture of Queers, by Richard Dyer. Journal of Gender Studies, 13.1(2004), 77-78.
In his 2011 In the Space of a Song: the Uses of Song in Film, Dyer analyses film musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis and A Star is Born to examine the role of song in film through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality.
Throughout his career he has been commissioned by the British Film Institute to write film analyses, some of which include Seven (1999) and Brief Encounter (1993). Thus Dyer is recognised as both an academic and film critic.
Dyer has also appeared in several television documentaries. In 1991, he appeared in Alma Cogan: The Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice. In 1995 he contributed to the documentary film The Celluloid Closet, which explores the history of depictions of lesbians and gay men in American films and was first screened in the UK on Channel 4 on 5 September 1996. Five years later when the documentary was released on DVD, unused material was edited together to form a one-hour show entitled Rescued From the Closet.
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