Topics in EALC: Queer Literature and Politics in Contemporary East Asia

Undergraduate / Graduate

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of queer literature from East Asia in English translation. This course will focus on such contemporary fiction, exploring how "queer" interfaces with issues of identity and subjecthood; desire, embodiment and reproduction; creativity and labor, and more. To this end, beyond issues of fictional representation, we will work to parse the relation between queer as an identity or subject position (queer people/characters) and queer as a set of interpretive strategies and ethical orientations to cultural texts (queer critique). In the first half of the quarter, we will examine some of this recent fiction alongside queer literary criticism and theory, and hold in-class workshops to conceptualize together the "queer" in queer literature and learn about the current situation of queer activism and cultural production in East Asia. In the second half of the quarter, we will read further East Asian literature through several thematic clusters - family, fandom, desire, etc. - while applying the interpretive approaches we learned in the first. The course may include readings by authors such as Wang Xiaobo, Park Sang Young, Murata Sayaka, Li Kotomi and Chi Ta-Wei among others. No prior knowledge is required; all readings will be in English.