GSST Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality Studies
Fall 2023
Tuesday and Thursdays: 1:15-2:30PM
Instructor: Dr. Dahlia Li (dli3@swarthmore.edu)
Office Hours: Tuesday 1-2PM, Thursday 10-11AM and by appointment
Course Description
Not what is gender and sexuality—but with whom, where, when, and how do gender and sexuality direct our sense of life, politics, and desire? With a focus on perspectives from QTBIPOC (queer, trans, black, indigenous, and people of color) and feminist-of-color cultural politics, this introduction to gender and sexuality studies surveys how the notions of “gender” and “sexuality” have become both commonplace and culturally re-defined and re-invigorated in the 20th and 21st centuries.
While categories like “man” and “woman” and carnal desires have long existed, the meaningfulness of terms like “gender” and “sexuality” are relatively recent in human history. How is it, then, that everyday choices like what bathrooms to go into, what clothes we wear, and who and how we choose to desire determine how human we feel and how alien others can be? As an introductory course to the field of gender and sexuality studies, this course offers a narrative of how the scientific discourse around gender and sexuality became such a dominant force for organizing human difference in the realms of culture and law. Alongside this story of how gender and sexuality has both caged and freed, we will attend to significant moments in 20th and 21st-century history (third-world liberation, the birth of ethnic studies, the AIDS crisis, legalized gay marriage, the “trans tipping point,” Black Lives Matter, the Anthropocene, abolition, Indigenous reparations) and the communal responses that have defined queer and feminist political orientations.
Case studies in law, medicine, performance, literature, visual art, film, and contemporary media will demonstrate how gender and sexuality studies, as an inter- and tran-disciplinary field of study can interanimate and enrich how we come to know things. Though by nature of our location in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania we will be primarily Anglophone and North-American centric in our syllabus, course readings and guided engagement of students’ own diverse disciplinary, geographic, and experiential backgrounds will provide tools for re-imagining what a more socially-accountable form of liberal arts and civic education could look like. Through an emphasis on the critical evaluation and contextualization of personal experience, this course will familiarize students with how an increasing awareness of oppression’s complexity generates productive limits to what we think we already know and how we could know more and better.
Short writing assignments and presentations will help students situate themselves within a broad field to find what most suits their intellectual, personal, and professional interests. These assignments will also build towards final projects which may take the form of a traditional academic paper or creative/activist projects chosen with instructor consultation. Classroom participation will be crucial; throughout the semester we will collectively work towards synthesizing and defining how gender and sexuality are most meaningful when they allow us to gather and continuously define ethical commitments rather than sort us into static identities.
Grading Breakdown
Attendance and Classroom Participation: 40%
Class will be conducted in a seminar-discussion format so active participation will be crucial to our collective success. If seminar formats feel unfamiliar or intimidating to you, please do not hesitate to meet with me individually during office hours to brainstorm how to make robust participation more attainable. Regular attendance is expected, though you will be given 2 free unexplained absences.
As part of your participation grade, you will be expected to sign up for 1 classroom presentation (5-10 minutes) where you critically summarize a reading and pose questions for classroom discussion.
3 Short Writing Assignments (~2 pages each): 30%
• Keyword Assignment 10%
• Critical Disagreement Assignment 10%
• Historical Contextualization Assignment 10%
At the beginning of the semester I will go over, and upload to canvas, instructions for the 3 short writing assignments. With the exception of the final project proposal, which will be due at the beginning of week 9, these assignments can be turned in any time during the semester—though not all at once (e.g. you cannot turn both the keyword and the critical disagreement assignments in the same week).
Final Project: 30%
Final projects may take the form of a 6-8 page analytic paper or alternative projects. Suggested papers topics will be posted to canvas around mid-term, but need not be strictly followed. Alternative projects might take the form of a creative project (2-3 pages or 5-10 minutes of filmic, recorded, or performed material) or a well-thought out syllabus for an extracurricular reading group with an additional 2-3 page explanation of methodologies and the critical relevance of your project to topics covered in this course. All alternative projects must be pre-approved by the instructor before Thanksgiving break.
Unit 1: Foundations
Week 1: Knowing Ourselves
9/5: Introductions and Course Overview
• Minna Salawi. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. (2020) excerpts
• Charlotte Higgins. “The age of patriarchy, or, how an unfashionable idea became a rallying cry for feminism today” in The Guardian (2018)
9/7: Experience as Methodology, The Limits of Identity
• Cathy Cohen. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” in GLQ (1997)
Week 2: Patriarchy and its Discontents
9/12: Womanism
• Patricia Hill Collins. “What’s in a name?: Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond” in The Black Scholar (1996)
• M.A. James Guerrero. “’Patriarchical Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism” in Hypatia (2003).
9/14: Theorizing Gender Relations
• Gayle Rubin. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of ‘Sex’” in Toward an Anthropology of Women. (1975)
Week 3: Institution, Laws, Norms
9/19: The Repressive Hypothesis
• Michel Foucault. Excerpts from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1976)
• Recommended: Joan Scott. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In The American Historical Review. (1986)
9/21: Hysteria and Peri-/Sub- Humanities
• In-class lecture on the history of Hysteria
• Zakkiyah Jackson. Excerpts from Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020)
Week 4: Historical Precedents
9/26: Producing “Womanhood” and the Feminist Complaint
• Olympe de Gouges. “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” (1789)
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. “The Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Conference” (1848)
• “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977)
• Emi Koyama. “The Transfeminist Manifesto” (2001)
• Sarah Ahmed. “Feminist Complaint” from feministkilljoys blog. (2014)
9/28: AIDS and the need for Deviant Affirmations
• Listen: “ACT UP: A History of AIDS/HIV Activism” from NPR (2021)
• Deborah B. Gould. “ACT UP, Racism, and the Question of how to Use History” in Quarterly Journal of Speech (2012)
• Marlon Bailey. Excerpts from Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (2013)
Week 5: Intersections and Assemblages
10/3: Racial Exclusion
• Kimberle Crenshaw. “Mapping the Margings: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color” in Stanford Law Review (1991)
• Lisa Lowe. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (1991)
•
10/5: Trans-Assemblages
• Susan Stryker. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” in GLQ (1994)
• Jasbir Puar. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” (2012)
Week 6: Mid-term Review & Check In
10/10: Office Hours/Individual Conferences
10/12: Office Hours/Individual Conferences
Fall Break 10/13-10/23
Unit II: Theories and Practices of Liberation
Week 7: Counterpublics
10/24: What is a Counterpublic?
• Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public” in Critical Inquiry (1998)
• Recommended: Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (2005)
10/26: Queer Gestures, Minor Worldings
• Juana Maria Rodriguez. Excerpts from Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014)
• Laura Horak. “Trans on Youtube: Intimacy, Visibility, and Temporality” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014)
Week 8: Suspect Freedoms, Queer(er) Liberations
10/31: Pinkwashing and the problems of “Queer” Legibility
• Jasbir Puar. Excerpts from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)
11/2: Selling Trans Desires
• Dean Spade, excerpts from Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (2015)
• Aren Aizura, excerpts from Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (2022)
Week 9: Haunting Sexualities and Queer Indebtedness
11/7: Melancholia and Homosociality
• Judith Butler. “Melancholy Gender: Refused Identification” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1995)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick. Excerpts from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
11/9: Woundedness and Identity
• Wendy Brown. “Wounded Attachments” in Political Theory (1993)
• Wendy Brown. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” in differences (2001)
Week 10: Desire and the Senses
11/14: Black Feminist Poethics
• In-Class Lecture: 1968
• Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury” (1985) & “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978)
• Roderick Ferguson. “Of Sensual Matters: On Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2012)
• Simone White. “Lotion” in Of Being Dispersed (2016)
11/16: Desire
• Elizabeth Freeman. excerpts from Beside you in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in 19th-Century America (2019)
• Jennifer Nash. excerpts from Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2018)
Week 11: Queer-of-Color Critique
11/21:
• José Esteban Muñoz. Excerpts from Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999)
11/23: Thanksgiving Break
Week 12: Liberation and the Liberal Arts
11/28:
• Roderick Ferguson. Excerpts from The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) and We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017)
11/30:
• Attend Roderick Ferguson’s Aydelotte Center Lecture
Week 13: Gender and Sexuality at the End of the World
12/5: Re-Calibrations
• Kemi Adeyemi. “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2019)
• Harlan Weaver. “A Love Letter to the Future (From the Surgical Team of the Trans Sciences Collective” in TSQ (2020)
12/7: The Ethics of Human Impermanence
• Kim TallBear. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Families” in Making Kin Not Populations (2018)
• Eve Tuck, Hailehana Stepetin, Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Jo Billows. “Visiting as an Indigenous Feminist Practice” in Gender and Education (2023)
Week 14: Wrap Up
12/12: Final Review/Individual Meetings
12/16: Final Papers due
Fall 2023
Tuesday and Thursdays: 1:15-2:30PM
Instructor: Dr. Dahlia Li (dli3@swarthmore.edu)
Office Hours: Tuesday 1-2PM, Thursday 10-11AM and by appointment
Course Description
Not what is gender and sexuality—but with whom, where, when, and how do gender and sexuality direct our sense of life, politics, and desire? With a focus on perspectives from QTBIPOC (queer, trans, black, indigenous, and people of color) and feminist-of-color cultural politics, this introduction to gender and sexuality studies surveys how the notions of “gender” and “sexuality” have become both commonplace and culturally re-defined and re-invigorated in the 20th and 21st centuries.
While categories like “man” and “woman” and carnal desires have long existed, the meaningfulness of terms like “gender” and “sexuality” are relatively recent in human history. How is it, then, that everyday choices like what bathrooms to go into, what clothes we wear, and who and how we choose to desire determine how human we feel and how alien others can be? As an introductory course to the field of gender and sexuality studies, this course offers a narrative of how the scientific discourse around gender and sexuality became such a dominant force for organizing human difference in the realms of culture and law. Alongside this story of how gender and sexuality has both caged and freed, we will attend to significant moments in 20th and 21st-century history (third-world liberation, the birth of ethnic studies, the AIDS crisis, legalized gay marriage, the “trans tipping point,” Black Lives Matter, the Anthropocene, abolition, Indigenous reparations) and the communal responses that have defined queer and feminist political orientations.
Case studies in law, medicine, performance, literature, visual art, film, and contemporary media will demonstrate how gender and sexuality studies, as an inter- and tran-disciplinary field of study can interanimate and enrich how we come to know things. Though by nature of our location in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania we will be primarily Anglophone and North-American centric in our syllabus, course readings and guided engagement of students’ own diverse disciplinary, geographic, and experiential backgrounds will provide tools for re-imagining what a more socially-accountable form of liberal arts and civic education could look like. Through an emphasis on the critical evaluation and contextualization of personal experience, this course will familiarize students with how an increasing awareness of oppression’s complexity generates productive limits to what we think we already know and how we could know more and better.
Short writing assignments and presentations will help students situate themselves within a broad field to find what most suits their intellectual, personal, and professional interests. These assignments will also build towards final projects which may take the form of a traditional academic paper or creative/activist projects chosen with instructor consultation. Classroom participation will be crucial; throughout the semester we will collectively work towards synthesizing and defining how gender and sexuality are most meaningful when they allow us to gather and continuously define ethical commitments rather than sort us into static identities.
Grading Breakdown
Attendance and Classroom Participation: 40%
Class will be conducted in a seminar-discussion format so active participation will be crucial to our collective success. If seminar formats feel unfamiliar or intimidating to you, please do not hesitate to meet with me individually during office hours to brainstorm how to make robust participation more attainable. Regular attendance is expected, though you will be given 2 free unexplained absences.
As part of your participation grade, you will be expected to sign up for 1 classroom presentation (5-10 minutes) where you critically summarize a reading and pose questions for classroom discussion.
3 Short Writing Assignments (~2 pages each): 30%
• Keyword Assignment 10%
• Critical Disagreement Assignment 10%
• Historical Contextualization Assignment 10%
At the beginning of the semester I will go over, and upload to canvas, instructions for the 3 short writing assignments. With the exception of the final project proposal, which will be due at the beginning of week 9, these assignments can be turned in any time during the semester—though not all at once (e.g. you cannot turn both the keyword and the critical disagreement assignments in the same week).
Final Project: 30%
Final projects may take the form of a 6-8 page analytic paper or alternative projects. Suggested papers topics will be posted to canvas around mid-term, but need not be strictly followed. Alternative projects might take the form of a creative project (2-3 pages or 5-10 minutes of filmic, recorded, or performed material) or a well-thought out syllabus for an extracurricular reading group with an additional 2-3 page explanation of methodologies and the critical relevance of your project to topics covered in this course. All alternative projects must be pre-approved by the instructor before Thanksgiving break.
Unit 1: Foundations
Week 1: Knowing Ourselves
9/5: Introductions and Course Overview
• Minna Salawi. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. (2020) excerpts
• Charlotte Higgins. “The age of patriarchy, or, how an unfashionable idea became a rallying cry for feminism today” in The Guardian (2018)
9/7: Experience as Methodology, The Limits of Identity
• Cathy Cohen. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” in GLQ (1997)
Week 2: Patriarchy and its Discontents
9/12: Womanism
• Patricia Hill Collins. “What’s in a name?: Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond” in The Black Scholar (1996)
• M.A. James Guerrero. “’Patriarchical Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism” in Hypatia (2003).
9/14: Theorizing Gender Relations
• Gayle Rubin. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of ‘Sex’” in Toward an Anthropology of Women. (1975)
Week 3: Institution, Laws, Norms
9/19: The Repressive Hypothesis
• Michel Foucault. Excerpts from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1976)
• Recommended: Joan Scott. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In The American Historical Review. (1986)
9/21: Hysteria and Peri-/Sub- Humanities
• In-class lecture on the history of Hysteria
• Zakkiyah Jackson. Excerpts from Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020)
Week 4: Historical Precedents
9/26: Producing “Womanhood” and the Feminist Complaint
• Olympe de Gouges. “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” (1789)
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. “The Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Conference” (1848)
• “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977)
• Emi Koyama. “The Transfeminist Manifesto” (2001)
• Sarah Ahmed. “Feminist Complaint” from feministkilljoys blog. (2014)
9/28: AIDS and the need for Deviant Affirmations
• Listen: “ACT UP: A History of AIDS/HIV Activism” from NPR (2021)
• Deborah B. Gould. “ACT UP, Racism, and the Question of how to Use History” in Quarterly Journal of Speech (2012)
• Marlon Bailey. Excerpts from Butch Queen Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (2013)
Week 5: Intersections and Assemblages
10/3: Racial Exclusion
• Kimberle Crenshaw. “Mapping the Margings: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color” in Stanford Law Review (1991)
• Lisa Lowe. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (1991)
•
10/5: Trans-Assemblages
• Susan Stryker. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” in GLQ (1994)
• Jasbir Puar. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” (2012)
Week 6: Mid-term Review & Check In
10/10: Office Hours/Individual Conferences
10/12: Office Hours/Individual Conferences
Fall Break 10/13-10/23
Unit II: Theories and Practices of Liberation
Week 7: Counterpublics
10/24: What is a Counterpublic?
• Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public” in Critical Inquiry (1998)
• Recommended: Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (2005)
10/26: Queer Gestures, Minor Worldings
• Juana Maria Rodriguez. Excerpts from Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014)
• Laura Horak. “Trans on Youtube: Intimacy, Visibility, and Temporality” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014)
Week 8: Suspect Freedoms, Queer(er) Liberations
10/31: Pinkwashing and the problems of “Queer” Legibility
• Jasbir Puar. Excerpts from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)
11/2: Selling Trans Desires
• Dean Spade, excerpts from Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (2015)
• Aren Aizura, excerpts from Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (2022)
Week 9: Haunting Sexualities and Queer Indebtedness
11/7: Melancholia and Homosociality
• Judith Butler. “Melancholy Gender: Refused Identification” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1995)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick. Excerpts from Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
11/9: Woundedness and Identity
• Wendy Brown. “Wounded Attachments” in Political Theory (1993)
• Wendy Brown. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” in differences (2001)
Week 10: Desire and the Senses
11/14: Black Feminist Poethics
• In-Class Lecture: 1968
• Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury” (1985) & “The Uses of the Erotic” (1978)
• Roderick Ferguson. “Of Sensual Matters: On Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2012)
• Simone White. “Lotion” in Of Being Dispersed (2016)
11/16: Desire
• Elizabeth Freeman. excerpts from Beside you in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in 19th-Century America (2019)
• Jennifer Nash. excerpts from Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2018)
Week 11: Queer-of-Color Critique
11/21:
• José Esteban Muñoz. Excerpts from Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999)
11/23: Thanksgiving Break
Week 12: Liberation and the Liberal Arts
11/28:
• Roderick Ferguson. Excerpts from The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) and We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017)
11/30:
• Attend Roderick Ferguson’s Aydelotte Center Lecture
Week 13: Gender and Sexuality at the End of the World
12/5: Re-Calibrations
• Kemi Adeyemi. “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2019)
• Harlan Weaver. “A Love Letter to the Future (From the Surgical Team of the Trans Sciences Collective” in TSQ (2020)
12/7: The Ethics of Human Impermanence
• Kim TallBear. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Families” in Making Kin Not Populations (2018)
• Eve Tuck, Hailehana Stepetin, Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Jo Billows. “Visiting as an Indigenous Feminist Practice” in Gender and Education (2023)
Week 14: Wrap Up
12/12: Final Review/Individual Meetings
12/16: Final Papers due
- Teacher: Dahlia Li