Introduction to LGBTQ Studies

Catalog description

An introduction to the dominant themes in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, with an emphasis on both literary & cultural studies. This course explores the history of modern, western ideas about sexual identity as manifested in literature, theater, film, and other narrative forms of popular culture. Drawing on the substantial body of "queer theory" generated by scholars in the humanities since the 1990s, this class examines sexuality not as a "natural" or consistent phenomenon, but as a set of beliefs that have changed over time and manifest themselves differently in different cultural and historical contexts. Starting in the late nineteenth century, scientific and medical authorities began categorizing individuals into sexual types based on their manifestations of gendered characteristics and their erotic attractions and practices. This medical typing corresponded with the development of subcultures associated with deviance from sexual norms; these subcultures produced a rich variety of texts, images, performances, and social forms, many of which became central to both popular and high culture. This course explores this rich archive, moving among media. It investigates constructions of sexual conformity and how sexual nonconformists positioned themselves in relation to cultural and medical group identities. It examines how distinctions between gendered, raced, and classed bodies were historically produced and culturally contested. It considers what commonalities gay identities may - or may not -- share with lesbian identities and how transgender and other identities have altered perceptions of sexual identity. The course also explores the relationship of the avant-garde to the mass media and how sexual subcultures have shaped literary and other cultural forms of expression. Comparative study of issues of sexual mobility beyond and between the borders of the United States expands the course's critical scope beyond dominant forms of western culture. This course does not propose definitive answers to the questions of identity it addresses. Instead it negotiates the ways sexualities have enabled individuals to articulate -- and disarticulate -- themselves within social bodies past and present. This course, therefore, has wide relevance for students interested in how group identities come into being and transform over time in dynamic relation to other historical forces. Exploring a wide variety of cultural forms associated with the history of sexual identity as well as a variety of interpretations of that history, this course opens students to an archive of literature, theater, film, and other narrative arts with the potential to inform and enrich their understandings of many kinds of challenges to regimes of normativity today.