How to do things with Homosexual Bodies

Catalog description

Homosexuality, as a term, might be a relatively recent invention in Western culture but bodies that acted and appeared ‘differently’ existed long before that. This course will focus on acts, and not identities, in tracing the evolution of writing the homosexual body from antiquity until today. In doing so it will explore a number of multimodal materials – texts, vases, sculptures, paintings, movies etc. – in an effort to understand the evolution of the ways in which language (written, spoken or visual) registers the homosexual body in literature and culture. When we bring the dimension of the body into the way we view the past, we find that new questions and new ways of approaching old questions emerge. What did the ancient actually write about the homosexual body? Did they actually create gender non-binary statues? Can we find biographies of the lives of saints in drag in Byzantium? How did the Victorians change the way in which we understand homosexual writing in Antiquity? How is the queer body registered in Modern Greek Literature and Culture? Can one write the history of homosexuality as a history of bodies? These are some of the questions that we will examine during the semester