Black Feminist and Queer of Color Theory

Catalog description

This introductory queer and feminist studies course will center the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black feminist theory and queer of color critique. The course will read scholarship by Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy J. Cohen, the Combahee River Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer C. Nash, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. The course will also explore documentary films by Marlon Riggs, fiction by Toni Morrison, creative nonfiction and poetry by Claudia Rankine, and the films Moonlight (directed by Barry Jenkins) and The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye). Conference projects will emerge from archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the Sarah Lawrence College Library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including: 1) critical fabulation, 2) institutionality and the academy, 3) violence, resistance, and care, and 4) emotion. Major writing assignments will include four brief “archival dispatches,” where students will report on their research findings to describe their intellectual, political, and emotional investments in the archives. For the course’s final assignment, students will develop an individual project proposal that envisions a future intellectual, activist, or artistic response to the archives. Perverts in Groups: Queer Social Lives LGST 3022 Julie Abraham Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits Contradictory assumptions about the relation of homosexuals to groups have dominated accounts of modern LGBT life. In Western Europe and the United States, from the late 19th century onward, queers have been presented as…