Queering Intimacy: Racial Erotics in Black and Brown Spaces

Catalog description

What do sex and love have to do with race and ethnicity? This is an interdisciplinary seminar on the intimate life of minoritized subjects. The course examines the links between racial formations, sexualities, intimacies, and liberation in the U.S. It focuses on literary, visual, and embodied forms of representation by Black and Brown artists, including performers, filmmakers, playwrights, novelists, and poets, who turn to the aesthetic to negotiate the public and very private entanglements of being Black and Brown in a society structured through antiblackness and antibrownness. The course traces forms of intimacy, erotics, and liberation through the feminist and queer forms of belonging, desire, and kinship produced by Black and Brown subjects under the cloak of racial terror and other forms of political violence. How do the intimate lives of marginalized publics emerge in the context of racial terror? We address the relationship between race and the erotics of intimacy in works by canonical artists and writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Cathy Cohen, and Alice Walker. As well as more recent scholarship by feminist, queer and cultural theorists, including Amber Musser, Marisa Solomon, Jazmine Sullivan, Sonya Clark, and Kinitra Brooks will inform our discussions of gender and sexuality, form and genre, family and kinship, and the embodied experiences of race and liberation.