English 556: Queers That Matter
I’ve ripped this title from Judith Butler’s study, Bodies That Matter, in order to pose a different, though related, set of questions that we’ll take up in our examination of queer subject formation. Chief among them are: what are the intellectual and socio-political consequences of understanding queerness as embodied and bodies as irreducibly social, caught up within materio-discursive networks that determine how different bodies are regarded and the treatment they are thus accorded; what are the promises and pitfalls of queer as an analytic, an organizational rubric, a “world making” strategy. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s Gender Trouble are seminar prerequisites. Expect heavy reading in diverse iterations of queer theory, a couple of novels (Delany’s Dahlgren is a likely candidate), and some film.