Department of English

Scholars in queer studies have contributed powerful critiques of the disciplines and of academic business as usual. For this reason, we might see the field as being anti-method rather than producing alternative or counter-methods. This course explores the paradox of producing positive knowledge in the absence of or in opposition to disciplinary dictates about what counts as knowledge. We will consider queer and feminist studies alongside other inter- and anti-disciplinary formations including critical race studies, disability studies, border studies, transgender studies, affect studies, and feminist science studies. Acknowledging the extent to which queer and feminist scholarship incorporate the work of traditional disciplines, we will consider several ethical and methodological cruxes in these fields.  We will focus on a range of methodological experiments in these fields including critiques of historicism, the affective turn, queer materialism, surface reading, memoir, low and high theory, queer empiricism, extravagant formalism, and assemblage theory, among others, and will attend to the ways that academic institutionalization has shaped these fields. Readings by Gloria Anzaldúa, Carolyn Steedman, Samuel Delany, Gayle Rubin,  Donna Haraway, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robyn Wiegman, Fred Moten, Sandra Harding, Roderick Ferguson, Lauren Berlant, Gayatri Spivak, Ann Cvetkovich, Cathy J. Cohen, Susan Stryker, and others.