MUTANTS AND MYSTICS: RACE, SEXUALITY, AND THE FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES

Credit Hours: 3 · Graduate

This is a course about the deep historical and conceptual connections between the histories of science fiction, the paranormal, and social transformation around race, gender, sexuality, and the human. We will see that such events tend to erupt in the “gaps” or “fractures” of society and within both personal and historical traumatic contexts in order to both deconstruct the reigning social formations, epistemologies, and ontologies—usually of an objectivizing, colonizing, and scientistic nature--but also supply the numinous foundations for the imagining of new humanities, or what queer theorist Ramzi Fawaz calls our emerging “mutanity.” Graduate/Undergraduate Equivalency: RELI 393 . Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for RELI 589 if student has credit for RELI 393 .