Queer Literature and Cinema

Catalog description

Students in this course will evaluate literary and cinematic representations of LGBTQ+ private and public life, analyzing discrete texts relative to the individual, social, and cultural contexts of their production. Working closely with a minoritized cannon of literature and film, students will identify and interpret common forms, genres, narratives, and tropes as responses to the politically, culturally, and aesthetically fraught question of "representation." How have writers and filmmakers sought to rethink the meaning and value of fictional representation and its relationship to the shifting political landscape around minority sexual and gender identities? The course will approach this question historically, through considering how theories and beliefs about representation emerged out of a specific social and cultural milieu, as will as examining how it might inform our understanding of queer politics and cultural work today. Working across media and thinking though the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and class, students will leverage creative narratives to produce more robust and complex accounts of human experience than is captured by near master narratives of liberal progress. Satisfies Magis Core: Literature. P: One Magis Core Curriculum Critical Issues in Human Inquiry course.