Culture and Queer Theory

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course introduces students to LGBT Studies and queer theory with specific focuses on keywords, concepts, and debate that animate the field. In particular, we will examine the role of culture as a site of power relation, aesthetic representation, historical memory, normalization, and where the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability take place. We will examine how different institutions, discourses, and social spaces shape the contours of desire, sexuality, subjectivity, social movement, resistance, and community formations in Euro-America and transnationally. In addition, students can expect to gain a working familiarity with the disciplinary formations of gay and lesbian studies, especially gay and lesbian social history and the debate on essentialism versus constructionism. Later on in the course, we will inquire how queer theory brings new set of analytical tools that destabilize even the claim to identity politics. In particular, we will examine how the frameworks of intersectionality, disidentifications, and assemblage complicate the question of identity (race, gender, class, etc.) that early queer theory tends to disavow with its almost exclusive focus on poststructuralist theory. Finally, we will think more capaciously about LGBT and queer politics by exploring new set of concerns that queer politics is currently facing, including questions of social inclusion, trans rights, the fight for gay marriage, unending war, financial insecurity, and neoliberalism. It is my hope that we can envision new ways of thinking about gender variance, body politics, queerness, and alternative cultural politics.