Topic: Queer/Trans Performance

Catalog description

The two terms that name this course — queer and performance — are as concrete as they are elusive. What exactly is queer? Is it an adjective or a verb? Embodied or enacted? What exactly is performance? Is it a practice, an improvisation or a staged production? This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to feminist, queer and trans- studies as they relate to the field of performance studies in order to theorize “queer performance.” Taking gender and sexuality as the lens through which to consider performance and vice versa, this course asks: what can queer performance teach us about aesthetics, politics and the social world? How are gender and sexuality mobilized in and as performance? Students will work with an expansive sense of performance – including performance art, theater, music, dance, new media, writing, activisms and performances of everyday life – to examine the ways in which gender and sexuality are enacted, felt, choreographed, listened to, staged, and improvised. In this course, students will be familiarized with current debates and key concepts in the fields, such as gender performativity, disidentification, embodiment, affect, queer of color critique, etc. They will develop a working vocabulary and theoretical toolbox to interpret and analyze enactments of gender and sexual dissidence. We will ask after the artistic and activist practices that queer and trans of color performance foreground, honoring its legacy to “third-world,” Chicana and Black feminisms. Conceiving theory and praxis together, we will pair our readings with contemporary performances and will explore ethnographic methods for documenting and writing about queer and trans- performance. Our objects of study will comprise a broad array of performances, such as Zoe Leonard’s manifesto “I want a president,” the performances of Xandra Ibarra, the poetry of García Lorca in “A Poet…