Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Studies (LGBT)

LGBT 1940 - A Global History of Love (4 Credits)  
By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2018  
LGBT 2232 - Queer Pop from the Stonewall Uprising to the Millennium (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MUSIC 2232, AMST 2232, FGSS 2232  
This course will survey the history and US political contexts of LGBTQ+ identities in popular music over three critical decades. We will cover the 1970s era of gay liberation and visibility with glam rock, first-wave punk, women’s music, and disco; the mainstreaming of queer sensibility in dance pop, new wave, and voguing in the neoliberal 1980s; and 1990s rise of queer theory, AIDS epidemic, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and queer activism reflected in queercore, crypto-queer alternative rock, and coded music videos. We will also consider how these past expressive strategies are referenced and extended in later and current queer pop.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
LGBT 2290 - Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 2290  
This course offers an introduction to central issues, debates, and theories that characterize the field of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Studies. Starting from the assumption that neither sex nor sexuality is a private experience or category, we will explore some of the ways that these powerfully public and political terms have circulated in social, legal, economic, and cultural spheres. We will also examine how these categories are situated in relation to other formative categories including race, ethnicity, religion, family, marriage, reproduction, the economy, and the state. Using a comparative and intersectional approach, we will read from various disciplines to assess the tools that LGBT studies offers for understanding power and culture in our contemporary world.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
LGBT 2350 - Literature and Medicine (3 Credits)  
How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019  
LGBT 2421 - Worlding Sex and Gender (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2421, FGSS 2421  
An introduction to the anthropology of sex, sexuality and gender, this course uses case studies from around the world to explore how the worlds of the sexes become gendered. In ethnographic, ethnohistorical and contemporary globalizing contexts, we will look at: intersexuality and supernumerary genders; physical and cultural reproduction; sexuality; and sex-based and gender-based violence and power. We will use lectures, films, discussion sections and short field-based exercises.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA, EAAREA, EUAREA, LAAREA, SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2019  
LGBT 2535 - Issues in Contemporary Fiction: Trans Utopias and Genderqueer Science Fiction (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 2535, FGSS 2535  
Dragons? Spaceships? Bodies that change gendered characteristics at will? Vampire archivists? Speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy) imagines the world not as it is but as it should be. It can imagine worlds where trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people thrive without danger or difficulty (and has done so for a long time). What do such worlds look like? How does it feel to read narratives where the gender binary does not work the way it does in our present day? This course surveys very recent trans- and non-binary-authored narratives. Readings may include (Cornell alumna) Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars, Isaac Fellman's Dead Collections (the trans vampire archivists), and short stories by authors like Torrey Peters and Daniel Lavery. Visits from authors being planned.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
LGBT 2560 - Black Queer Writing and Media (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 2560, ASRC 2560, AMST 2562, FGSS 2560  
This course will introduce students to Black Queer literatures and media. Since these materials decenter whiteness and patriarchal heterosexism, they often seem illegible to those approaching them from the perspective of the dominant culture. We will start with foundational texts that outline the parameters of our dominant culture. We will then discuss Black Queer contemporary novels, films, essays, and visual art in order to understand the ways that these works move past the limitations of those parameters. By engaging these literatures and media, this course investigates the exciting possibilities that emerge from understanding alternative ways of being and living in our world. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
LGBT 2760 - Desire (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 2760, COML 2760, FGSS 2760, PMA 2680  
Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2017  
LGBT 2762 - Desire and Modern Drama (2 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 2762, COML 2762, FGSS 2762, PMA 2762  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021  
LGBT 2770 - Islam and Gender (3 Credits)  
This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2019  
LGBT 3210 - Gender and the Brain (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with BIONB 3215, FGSS 3210  
Why are boys more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism, and why are women more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression? Are there different gay and straight brains? And how does brain science interact with gender and sexuality in popular debate? Reading and discussing the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender. In this course, we will delve into the neuroscience of gender difference. Reading the original scientific papers and related critical texts, we will ask whether we can find measurable physical differences in male and female brains, and what these differences might be. Do men and women solve spatial puzzles differently, as measured physiologically? Do nonhuman animals display sex-specific behaviors mediated by brain structure, and can we extrapolate these findings to human behavior? Why are boys three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed as autistic, and is there any connection between the predominantly male phenomenon of autism and other stereotypically male mental traits? Are there physical representations of sexual orientation in the brain, and how are these related to gender identity? And how are scientific studies represented and misrepresented in popular debate?
Prerequisites: BIONB 2220, BIOMG 3320, FGSS 2010, and LGBT 2290 or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (BIO-AS, SCD-AS), (BSC-AG, D-AG, OPHLS-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Demonstrate knowledge of the state of the field in gender and neuroscience.
  • Be able to apply concepts from history, philosophy, and critical theory to scientific texts.
  • Demonstrate understanding of the interaction of experimental design, stereotypes, and preconceptions in how studies are carried out and communicated.
  • Be aware of the range of experimental techniques available in neuroscience, and their advantages and limitations.
  
LGBT 3250 - Staging Gay and Transgender Histories (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 3755, FGSS 3250, VISST 3260  
How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2016, Spring 2014  
LGBT 3310 - Afro-Asia: Futurism and Feminism (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2020, Fall 2019  
LGBT 3318 - Virtual Music (3 Credits)  
This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of “virtual music” since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)  
LGBT 3550 - Decadence (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 3550, COML 3550, FGSS 3550  
“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Fall 2020, Spring 2020  
LGBT 3555 - Comics as a Medium (3 Credits)  
What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
LGBT 3635 - Queer Classics (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 3635, FGSS 3636, SHUM 3635  
This course engages classical antiquity and its reception through the prism of queer studies. Cruising Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, Ovid and more, we will explore how queer theoretical frameworks help us account for premodern queer and trans bodies, desires, experiences, and aesthetics. We will trace how people historically have engaged with the classical past in political and affective projects of writing queer history and literature, constructing identities and communities, and imagining queer futures. We will unpack how classical scholarship might reproduce contemporary forms of homophobia and transphobia in its treatments of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the classical past, and in turn how modern uses of the classical might reinforce or dismantle exclusionary narratives around 'queerness' today as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, we will consider how the work we are doing in this class (where the 'Queer' in 'Queer Classics' may be taken as an adjective or an imperative) relates to the ways that contemporary writers, activists, artists, and performers have animated the classical past with queer possibilities. All readings will be in translation; no knowledge of Latin and Greek is required.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023  
LGBT 3702 - Desire and Cinema (4 Credits)  
The pleasure of the text, Roland Barthes writes, is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas-for my body does not have the same ideas I do. What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas? In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2016, Fall 2013  
LGBT 3740 - Parody (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 3740, FGSS 3740, AMST 3745  
In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2014  
LGBT 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance (4 Credits)  
In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2017  
LGBT 3990 - Undergraduate Independent Study (1-4 Credits)  
Individual study program intended for juniors and seniors working on special topics with selected reading or research projects not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with an LGBT Studies faculty member who has agreed to supervise independent study.
Prerequisites: LGBT 2290 and one additional LGBT Studies course at the 3000-level.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
LGBT 4290 - The Sexual Politics of Religion (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 4290, ANTHR 4490, RELST 4240  
Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Enrollment Information: Not open to: first-year students.  
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, KCM-AG), (ETM-AS, GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2015, Fall 2012  
LGBT 4432 - Queer Theory and Kinship Studies (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 4432, ANTHR 4432  
As a symbolic system and field of practice, kinship produces configurations of sexuality, gender, race and power embodied by persons. This recognition is indebted to critical race, feminist, postcolonial and queer interventions in the field of kinship studies. In this course we will review key texts in this field beginning with classic anthropological theories of kinship. We will consider the variability of sanctioned arrangements of sexuality, procreation, household labor and economy across the historical and ethnographic record. Focusing on this variation, we will pose relatedness as a question. Which lives, forms of desire, modes of embodiment are enabled, and which are abjected through the grammar of kinship at work in a particular place and time? What possibilities of life lie outside dominant kinmaking practices? What pleasures and what costs does exile from kinship entail?
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2011  
LGBT 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema (3 Credits)  
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2019  
LGBT 4688 - Trans Studies at a Crossroads (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4688, ASRC 4688, FGSS 4688  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
LGBT 4701 - Nightlife (4 Credits)  
This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
LGBT 4705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture (3 Credits)  
How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
LGBT 4835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 4835, VISST 4835, FGSS 4835  
An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2016, Fall 2013, Spring 2011  
LGBT 4876 - Humanitarian Affects (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 4876, GOVT 4745, ANTHR 4176  
Liberal feminists and political theorists argue that sentiments such as compassion and empathy have the capacity to alert us to suffering, injustice, and oppression, and thus incite transformative political action. This interdisciplinary seminar explores the challenges to this theory by staging a conversation between postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories of affect, and anthropological critiques of humanitarian projects. Sentiments are mobilized to defend borders, wage wars, grant asylum to refugees, provide medical care and disaster relief, and inspire feminist activism. We will analyze how these gendered and racialized ethical projects and political regimes are co-constituted, and how they mediate access to resources and survival, as well as political agency, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2014  
LGBT 6290 - The Sexual Politics of Religion (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 6290, ANTHR 7490, RELST 6290  
Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2015, Fall 2012  
LGBT 6301 - Queer Media Studies (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COMM 6300, FGSS 6301  
This course investigates how sexuality, broadly conceived, is produced, represented, and enacted through a variety of media. We will consider how groups of people collectively produce their erotic identifications, practices, and connections through media and in space. These affinities may be transient or life-long, co-present or virtual, of the majority or marginalized. Rather than assuming sex is a private matter, we will analyze the ways sexuality is constituted through media engagements, in physical and online spaces, and in the ways that mediated desire play out in broad movements of consumerism and neoliberal aspirations. We will consider sexual cultures from a transnational perspective and in historical context. The course will address how structural hierarchies such as gender, race, sexual identification, and location help to shape sexual media.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Evaluate a variety of contemporary analyses of media and sexuality.
  • Identify intersections among media, sexuality, gender, race, and class.
  • Appraise the significance of historical and geographical specificity in mediated sexuality.
  • Situate media studies within broader approaches to sexuality.
  • Conduct an independent research project with particular attention to writing-as-research.
  
LGBT 6331 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema (3 Credits)  
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2019  
LGBT 6445 - Modernist Fiction and the Erotics of Style (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 6554, FGSS 6554  
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2019  
LGBT 6505 - Queer Proximities (4 Credits)  
How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities? In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Felix, Gonzalez-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021  
LGBT 6600 - Erotics of Visuality (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 6600, FGSS 6610, COML 6601, PMA 6670  
You didn't see anything, a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand. What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2016, Fall 2013, Spring 2009  
LGBT 6688 - Trans Studies at a Crossroads (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6688, ASRC 6688, FGSS 6688  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
LGBT 6689 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
LGBT 6705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture (3 Credits)  
How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
LGBT 6755 - Staging Gay and Transgender Histories (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with PMA 6755, FGSS 6755  
How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Fall 2016  
LGBT 6775 - Queer Time and the Senses (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 6775, FGSS 6775  
In what temporal zone does narrative practice meet the senses? Put differently, what is the temporal work done by the senses in a text? This seminar focuses on the temporal effects of narrative representations of the sensorium, the ways that the senses can function in narrative to open up times/spaces of queer potentiality. It investigates how the experience of the sensorium can render its subject out of sync with normative time, enabling that subject to feel the pleasure of such a state rather than merely its terrors. We will also explore the extent to which the senses function to disrupt heteronormative timelines and consequently serve both as a resource for queer survival and a potentially revolutionary practice.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
LGBT 7432 - Queer Theory and Kinship Studies (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 7432, ANTHR 7432  
As a symbolic system and field of practice, kinship produces configurations of sexuality, gender, race and power embodied by persons. This recognition is indebted to critical race, feminist, postcolonial and queer interventions in the field of kinship studies. In this course we will review key texts in this field beginning with classic anthropological theories of kinship. We will consider the variability of sanctioned arrangements of sexuality, procreation, household labor and economy across the historical and ethnographic record. Focusing on this variation, we will pose relatedness as a question. Which lives, forms of desire, modes of embodiment are enabled, and which are abjected through the grammar of kinship at work in a particular place and time? What possibilities of life lie outside dominant kinmaking practices? What pleasures and what costs does exile from kinship entail?
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2011