Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Literature

Catalog description

This course is a cross-cultural exploration of the construction of gender through significant landmarks in contemporary literature, from feminist and queer theory perspectives. The course will focus on a range of novels, short stories, essays and poetry written in the twentieth- and the twenty-first century from or about the United States, Europe and the MENA region. Through an examination of these works, alongside seminal works of feminist and queer theory (Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, Eve Sedgwick, etc.) we will ask: What does it mean to read literature through the lens of gender, why does it matter and how is it done? Is there a distinctive mode of writing by women and for women? Is it possible to write about a similar issue as represented across texts from both the Global North and Global South, and how do you do so ethically without either erasing difference or exaggerating it? Is it possible to forge greater solidarities through a kind of “transnational” criticism? How do these texts dismantle the ways we have been taught to evaluate canonical, male-dominated literary histories? Authors will include Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi and Abdellah Taïa.