No Place Like Gender

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

*No Place Like Gender: Embodiment and Geopolitics* Whether at the border or in the clinic, in the courtroom or the classroom, in the archive or in translation, gender can be a site of power or precarity, an object of violence or desire. What is the relationship between gender and place? Does gender have a place in the body? In the mind? What is the place of gender in the family, the state, and the nation? When, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy utters the words “There’s no place like home,” the place she returns to does not resemble the one through which her narrative unfolds. Is gender a place through which one might travel? Can a body be like a home? Or is the body, as Plato suggests, “a prison house”? This metaphor positions the body as a site of discipling, surveillance, and confinement. And yet, to say “there’s no place like gender” might also suggest, by contrast, that gender is not a place at all— a “no place.” Considering contemporary trans and queer literature, film, and visual art from across the Américas and the Atlantic, this course examines the when and where of gender variance as it intersects with other axes of difference, asking how and why particular geopolitical formulations and cultural imaginaries become zones of conflict. Our studies will range across local contexts from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, from critical phenomenology to critical fabulation and beyond. Previous coursework in literary, critical, feminist, or trans and queer theory strongly recommended.