Fall 2006

E 389P • Feminism and the Emergence of Queer Theory

Course Description

This course will survey the emergence (and disappearance?) of queer theory as a subdiscipline in the Humanities and Social Sciences and as a set of conceptual contestations of key assumptions and strategies of feminist theory. We will attempt to assess queer theory's debt to various strands of feminism - Marxist, psychoanalytic, radical, and liberal or rights-based as we articulate queer theory's relation to cognate intellectual projects such as lesbian and gay studies and the history of sexuality. The impact of postcolonial, transnational and globalization studies on queer theory will be the focus of the last third of the course.

Texts

We will read excerpts from the following authors, Freud, Irigaray, Cixous, Rubin, Hartmann. MacKinnon, Hollibaugh, Wittig, Gilbert and Gubar, Butler, Berlant and Warner, Sedgwick, Spivak, Cvetkovich, Halberstam, Bersani, among others. We will end the course by looking at recent special issues of leading journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly that attempt to trace genealogies and assess legacies of queer theoretical projects.

back