Trans Lives: Past, Present, Future

Catalog description

This course explores some of the ways sex and gender have been constructed across time and place; how individuals have “transed” sex and gender throughout history; how activists, doctors, and bureaucrats have contested and policed a gender binary; how trans identities inform and interrupt feminist and queer studies; how the field of trans studies has been shaped and critiqued by trans of color, transnational, intersex, crip/disability, and fat activists and scholars; how trans lives and studies entail their specific set of ethical challenges; and how technologies and practices of bodily transformation may open up spaces to imagine new possibilities of self-identification and becoming. Through collaborative in-class activities and discussions informed by memoirs, treatises, academic works, documentaries, art, and a range of primary sources produced by, for, and about transgender people, this course provides students with a mapping of major concepts, questions, topics, experiences, and embodied practices within trans lives and studies as emerging fields of experience, research, and study in the twenty-first century.