Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality

Undergraduate / Graduate

Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the "new social movements" of the 60s and 70s, this seminar questions critically examines the theoretical histories that have determined how we think about gender and sex, as alternately something imposed on us externally, as 'structure,' and something identity-based, subjective, and internal. Since the 1990s, developments in queer, trans, feminist theory and Black studies have turned away from imagining politics and identity as structures in favor of thinking in terms of disruption, performativity, and fluid models of social construction and political action against it -- even as the movements they emerged out of relied heavily on critiques of Freud and Marx, refusing as well as using their theoretical imaginaries of politics as (materialist or psychic) structure. We will ask: what is a structural analysis? What is not a structural analysis, what is it opposed to? What do we mean when we enjoin ourselves to pay attention to structural conditions? How does thinking structure predispose us to think concepts like "sex," "sexuality," "race," and "gender" together or apart, as converging aspects of experience or as different epiphenomena of a single system? Starting from Afropessimism and the queer antisocial turn, readings will move backward in time to ask how notions of structure have informed theories of identity.