This seminar rests on three premises: first, the reproduction of the nation-state is inextricably bound up with the production and regulation of sexualities; second, historic changes wrought by capitalism extend to and depend upon transformations of sexualities in whose construction the human sciences, law, literature, film and other disciplines participate; third, sexuality is embodied in articulation with race, gender, class, age, and other social specificities. These three understandings will orient a critically informed interdisciplinary investigation of both hegemonic U.S. narratives which predicate national belonging on not being (identified as) a “sexual pervert” or “degenerate” and on counter-narratives, which affirm queer desires, imagine queer alliances and work to identify the linkages between normative sexual regimes and regulatory apparatuses of capitialism, imperialism, racism and masculinism in which sexuality is enmeshed.

Three historical moments structure our examination of sexuality and national belonging. The first, which we will cover relatively quickly, spans the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The nation-state is reconstructed at the expense of African Americans; restrictive immigration laws target Asians and Southeastern Europeans; the U.S. becomes an imperial power; capitalism transforms social relations and the landscape; America is “remasculinized”; the homosexual emerges as a pathological being and the heterosexual as his healthy/normal opposite; diverse biopolitical practices aim both to maximize the (re)productive life of (middle-class) Anglo Americans and to weed out, segregate or reform African Americans, recent immigrants, whites who cannot or will not be integrated into the circuits of capitalism, and homosexuals/inverts, all of are classified as “degenerates”; critical histories of nation, sexuality and race intervene in this nationalist narrative. The second historical moment stretches from the cold war into the civil rights era. Baldwin’s Another Country and shorter texts are in dialogue with liberalism’s “consensus narrative.” The latter promotes bourgeois domesticity and muscular masculinity as foundations of the national security state; it (re)identifies sexual and political dissent with each other and both with unAmericanism; it locates the source of homosexuality and communism in the Orient and domestic “momism”; it fetishizes the African American man and Asian woman, and offers various solutions to “the Negro problem.” The seminar ends with an extended analysis of how sexuality and U.S. citizenship are being articulated by queers and non queers under present conditions of hegemonic neoliberalism, transnational capitalism and the so-called “war on terror.” Essays from the Queer Issue of Social Text (fall-winter 2005) focus our discussion; if available, we will also read Chua’s Gold by the Inch.

A background in critical theory is strongly recommended; prior reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. I is required . All students should be prepared to discuss Foucault on the first day, and in September I will email the class a set of questions to guide our conversation about his genealogy.