Queer Cultures, Intimacies, and Embodiments in Historical Perspective

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines queer cultures, intimacies, and embodiments in twentieth-century United States history-not as a linear account of LGBTQ+ identity, but as an inquiry into the evolving relationship between the state and nonnormative gender and sexual practices and cultures. Topics include the emergence of vibrant queer urban subcultures in the 1890s; drag and camp as strategies of expression and politics; and the medicalization, criminalization, and exoticization of queerness through psychiatry, sodomy and cross-dressing laws, freak show spectacles, and Hollywood production codes. We then consider the postwar construction of "the closet" through federal discrimination and policing; the rise of homophile organizations, transgender street activism and feminist reconceptualization of sexuality and gender; 1980s necropolitical responses to HIV/AIDS; and increasingly visible cultures of resistance in the 1990s-via houses and ballrooms, ACT UP, feminist bookstores, homocore punk, and films. The course concludes by examining community struggles to create queer history, the rise of LGBTQ studies and queer theory, and contemporary attacks on this scholarship. In each geographic and temporal context, we ask: How does queerness emerge as a socially legible and politically charged form of difference? How is it shaped by-and how does it respond to-dominant economic, religious, and political systems? And how does it survive and flourish in the face of violence, stigma, and erasure?