Spring 2017 Courses

This course fulfills degree requirements for majors/minors in the fields of HIST, LGBT, WMST, as well as lower division elective credits for students of all subject disciplines. Explore the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the United States from the late 1800s to the present. Learn about:

• Queer sexual subcultures;
• Scientific classifications of sexual and gender identities;
• Love and sex before World War II;
• Repression of queer people by police and the state;
• Gay liberation, sexual revolutions, and creating a political movement;
• Feminism, politics, and lesbian culture;
• The AIDS epidemic and right-wing backlash;
• Race, sexuality, and queer communities of color;
• Changing perspectives on gender identity and expression.

This class explores the multifaceted relationships of sexuality and space/place. We will focus on sexuality in particular spaces (such as prisons, boarding schools, and highway rest areas) as well as the ways that sexuality (or its absence) creates particular spaces (such as gay neighborhoods, churches, and red light districts). We will look at the relationships of sexualities to public/private distinctions, as well as rural/urban, sacred/profane, and home/away. We will explore global issues around sexuality such as the role of sexuality in colonization, contemporary sex tourism and sex trafficking, and sexuality and nationalism more broadly. After reflecting on methodological considerations in studying sexuality and place (such as access, trust, and insider/outsider dynamics), you will have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned about the ways that sexuality and place shape one another in the midst of broader discourses of nation, gender, religion, race, class, and generation as you undertake a field research project on campus or in the local community.
May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours. Recommended prereq., WMST 2000 or 2600. Restricted to sophomores/juniors/seniors.

This upper level undergraduate course will examine the production of Latina/o identity and its limitations as it emerges within contemporary literature, music, film, and performance art. We will engage with texts that posit a queer analytical approach to study how Latinidad is informed by modes of desire and identification that fall out of dominant notions of “the Latino” in popular culture. We will ask: How do race, gender and sexuality produce alternative configurations of Latina/o identity; in what ways does Latiniadad shape the way we think of space and place; what does Latinidad look and sound like; how does it feel to be Latina/o? These questions open up Latinidad into a much fuller and capacious notion of identity formation that cut across race /ethnicity, languages and national identity. The theoretical goal of the class is to critically engage the limits of knowledge production around Latina/o identity in order to develop new analytics that abide by the question of Latinidad rather than posit an answer or solution to its political consequences in contemporary U.S. culture.

This course is organized around five entry points into Latinidad: Chicana feminism as a theoretical foundation; art and aesthetics; politics, the law and sexuality; regionalism and hemispheric studies; and the structure of feeling. The objectives are to: 1) provide a survey of contemporary queer Latina/o theory; 2) to understand ethnic identity as performative practices of aesthetics, desire, and feeling; 3) to learn how to think and write critically about the problem of identity in our contemporary moment; 4) learn how to read and analyze literature, film, art, and music in rigorous and innovative ways. We will draw upon feminist and queer artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, Diane Gamboa, ASCO, Carmelita Tropicana, Gloria Anzadúa, Felix-Gonzales Torres, Gil Cuadros, and Gregg Araki