Queer/Trans Culture

Catalog description

This first-year seminar will explore gender and sexuality as generative forces for thought and vision, focusing especially on modes of desire and gendered being that fall outside of available categories. Authors and artists will range from Proust to RuPaul; topics of discussion will include the politics of good versus bad feeling, the uses of shame, friendship, queer ecologies, and the aesthetics of camp and drag. We'll be especially interested throughout the semester in stories of transformation and metamorphosis. We might assume that queer or trans narratives hinge on the act of "coming out." Yet in some of the works we'll discuss this semester, characters live their queerness without any definitive declaration, and without necessarily laying claim to an LGBTQ+ "identity." Dissident sexuality or gender in these works is not necessarily the inner truth of a subject, let alone the core of a personality. Instead, it's an aesthetic phenomenon, a way of beholding the world, a tender attention to textures, surfaces, and nuances of affection.