Sexual and Gender Minorities: Past, Present, Future

Catalog description

This course supports students in developing thoughtful, grounded approaches to practice across micro and macro settings with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/gender expansive, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. With an emphasis on relational practice, students will examine how sexual and gender identities have been constructed, how they are regulated, and how they continue to be lived today—alongside how these realities shape client experiences, therapeutic relationships, and systems of care. Drawing from historical, political, and decolonial frameworks, this course invites students to critically reflect on their own positionalities and to engage in practices that are attuned to both structural harm and collective strategies of endurance and care. Attention is given to the impacts of systemic violence and marginalization, including minority stress, alongside possibilities for joy, care, and solidarity. Resilience among marginalized communities will additionally be explored as a contested concept, with attention not only to how it can obscure structural violence, but also to what it means to affirm survival in clinical work with care and accountability to the communities we aim to support.