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Queer Methods

ENGL 790.401
instructor(s):

Is there a queer method? To address this question, we will consider strategies critics in the field have undertaken in order to queer the disciplines: critiques of historicism, the affective turn, queer materialism, low and high theory, queer empiricism, experiments in phenomenology, extravagant formalism, assemblage theory, erotohistoriography, and subcultural studies, among others. At the same time we will address the politics of style that have always been central to the field. Taking up longstanding debates about queer universalism, we will consider to what extent queer studies is or ought to be anchored to specific sexual communities, histories, and acts, or whether queer can be understood as a vector that might cut across any form of inquiry. We will look at both foundational and recent texts in the field, including work by Gayle Rubin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, Michael Warner, Teresa De Lauretis, D. A. Miller, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Cherríe Moraga, Lauren Berlant, Cathy J. Cohen, Lee Edelman, J. Jack Halberstam, Jasbir Puar, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, Lisa Duggan, Kevin Floyd, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayle Salamon, Roderick Ferguson, Laura Kipnis, Tim Dean, and others.

fulfills requirements