ENG6544H: Queer, Trans and Feminist Historiographies

This is not a course in queer, feminist, or trans history. It is a course that will explore queer, trans, and feminist approaches and methods in historiography — that is, the techniques, sources, archives, practices, and theoretical approaches one might take to generate specifically queer, trans, and/or feminist understandings of and engagements with the past. In other words, we will concern ourselves not with recovering those sexual and gender identities at the margins of history but with exploring the methods, practices, and politics of how and why such histories get (re)told. We will be particularly concerned with the fictional, visual, and aesthetic shape of contemporary desires for relation to and/or use of the past. Speculation, imagination, attachment, potential history, counter-archive, and fabulation will all be key terms. We will read theoretical work by Azoulay, Freeman, Hartman, Nyong'o, Luciano, Ramirez, and others and literary texts by Dickinson, Hopkins, Hurston, de Waal, Carmack, Acker, and others.

0.50
St. George