Feeling Strange: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course, we explore questions of gender and sexuality across a range of cultural contexts to ask: what, if anything, makes social identities different in the global south and the global north? What might it mean to feel strange––and in whose eyes might someone appear strange? What do we even think strangeness is? We’ll explore how theories of gender and sex intersect with recent queer and trans fiction and nonfiction from the global south, and if they might offer theoretical frames of their own. Readings will include work from Agha Shahid Ali, Akwaeke Emezi, Ismat Chughtai, Carmen Maria-Machado, Virginia Woolf, and theory from Sara Ahmed, Paul B. Preciado, Susan Sontag, Alok Vaid-Menon, and others.