Course overview
This course engages a broad definition of queer as adjective, noun, and verb to consider how representative writers, thinkers, and performers have worked to unsettle sex and gender binaries and challenge normative gendered constructions of the body, family, community, race, and nation. It encourages students to explore the usefulness of gender studies, feminism, queer and trans* theories as frames for reading, and to develop capacities for the analysis and interpretation of literary and other cultural production from the late nineteenth century to the present. Considering cultural objects in a range of media and genres (from printed texts to performance art, from poetry, fiction and life-writing to comix, drama and film) and representing a wide spectrum of LGBTQ*IA+ experiences and identifications, the course asks how such work has queered the past and explored alternative futures, laying claim to new possibilities for art, politics, and embodied subjectivity.
Course learning outcomes
- Engage analytically with representations of gender and sexuality in a range of media
- Demonstrate awareness of contextually appropriate methodologies, theories, and vocabularies, in a self-reflexive manner
- Demonstrate alertness to questions of intercultural dialogue, neuro-diversity, and gender and sexual identity, performance, non-conformity, and diversity
- Communicate, orally and in writing, the findings of analysis and research with clarity, rigour, and precision
- Demonstrate communication skills appropriate to career readiness, including use of online learning technologies and peer-group collaboration