Queer Ethnographies

Catalog description

Prerequisite: at least one course in the humanities or social sciences This seminar will offer a critical introduction to the ethnographic study of queer life, examining how queerness is shaped and contested across cultural, national, and historical contexts. The cross-cultural perspective of this course illuminates the indeterminacy of the category “queer,” which then puts “universal” ideas of sex and gender into question. Here, queer performance art and drag emerge as two particularly dynamic sites where queer subjects parody and disidentify with fictions of identity. In this course, we will also explore the ways in which queerness shapes and is shaped by the politics of national belonging, citizenship, and neoliberal ideologies. We focus in particular on identity and rights-based gay activist movements that hinge on the stabilization and normalization of gay sexualities and trans identities, often to the exclusion of the most marginalized queer and trans people. This course will also include a critical examination of queer ethnographic methods as a way of understanding the base assumptions of ethnography. We will examine how queerness shapes the ethnographic method: How do queer ethnographers navigate their own queerness in relation to the field? How does queerness offer a critical framework through which to address the colonial and racial dynamics that subtend ethnographic fieldwork? How do queer theory and queer ethnography complicate and constitute one another? Course topics will include THE CURRICULUM 160 queer migration, queer performance, sexual economies, geographies of public sex, transnational queer activism, the intersections of neoliberalism and gay rights discourse, and homonormative citizenship. Course materials will include foundational and contemporary queer ethnographies, queer theory, memoir, and performance art. For conference work, students will…