GWSS 590B – Special Topics

Performing Black Queer Gender(s) considers how black feminist philosophers, queer & trans theorists, and performance theorists approach the historical production of racialized sexuality, situating performance as an optic through which the evolving visibility of, and politics that inhere in, black queer/ness takes shape more broadly.
The course pays particular attention to the strains of black feminist theory by Hortense Spillers and others who, in their historical, materialist approaches to the (co-)construction of categories of race, gender, and sexuality—as well as Body, Human, Subject, and Citizen—pose trenchant critiques of queer and performance studies that implicitly stabilize the liberal humanist subject. We read these texts in conversation with contemporary documentary films such as The Aggressives, Out in the Night, and Kiki, as well as performance ethnographies such as Butch Queens Up in Pumps, that demonstrate the construction, negotiation, and politics surrounding black queer gender(s) challenge the utopian enterprise of queer theory and performance theory alike.