Critical Sexuality and Queer Studies

Introduction to Critical Sexuality and Queer Studies
This course introduces students to key concepts, events, and movements in the history of the contemporary CSQS (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) and queer politics in the United States. Topics include: the relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality; the emergence of an identifiable LGB social movement in the United States; queer and trans critiques of LGB politics; and major issues for contemporary queer studies, including, for example, the politics of gay marriage, gay military service, and prison abolition. Drawing on interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to CSQS and queer social identities, cultures, and political movements, we will explore some of the following questions: What does it mean to “have a sexuality”? How do race, class, gender, dis/ability and citizenship status shape experiences and expressions of sexual identities? How have sexual and gender minorities organized themselves in the United States, and with what impact on the broader culture?

Sexuality and Space
How do the spaces we live in-our houses, neighborhoods, cities, environments, and national territories-impact the way we think about our sexual identities, orientations, and subcultures? This course will examine the relationships between gender, sexuality and space through the fundamental concepts of cultural geography, urban planning, and architecture. We will be thinking about spaces on multiple scales, starting with examining the body as “the geography closest in” (Rich) and “the closet” as a metaphor for those who identify as sexual and gender minorities but do not disclose their identities. We will then move to consideration of dwelling spaces: How do our living spaces reflect cultural assumptions about sexuality, family structures, and kinship? Ho do urban and rural spaces and their imaginaries reflect and shape cultural assumptions about “normal” bodies? How do nations, nationalism, settler-colonial spaces, and transnationalism’s shape ideas about sexuality at the level of population? How do migration and mobility practices across multiple borders affect sexual and gendered subjectivities? What spaces of resistance are queer people cultivating? As we ask these questions, we will necessarily be asking larger ones: How is knowledge and power wrapped up in how we organize and make meaning from different spaces?

Trans*Studies
Through a focus on the tensions between feminist, queer, and trans theory and activism, this course explores the burgeoning academic field of Trans Studies. The course opens with the infamous debates between some lesbian and radical feminists and trans scholars, activists, and artists around femininity and “authentic” womanhood beginning in the late 1970s. From there, we move into the “border wars” between queer and trans scholars that unfolded around the question of masculinity in the late 1990s. We then turn our focus to contemporary activism and scholarship that might be described as distinctively “trans*feminist.” This part of the course explores trans*feminist approaches to anti-Black racism, decolonizing/indigenous/two-spirit activism, prisons, shelters, and sex work. In conclusion, we reflect upon the recent institutionalization of Trans Studies to (re)consider the resonances in political investment that run across the interrelated fields of feminist, queer, and trans studies.