ENGL 2077 - Queering Utopia

This course engages a broad definition of ‘queer’—as adjective, noun, and verb—to consider how representative writers, thinkers, and performers have worked to unsettle sex and gender binaries and challenge normative gendered constructions of the body, family, community, race, and nation. It encourages students to explore the usefulness of gender studies, feminism, queer and trans* theories as frames for reading, and to develop capacities for the analysis and interpretation of literary and other cultural production from the late nineteenth century to the present. Considering cultural objects in a range of media and genres (from printed texts to performance art, from poetry, fiction and life-writing to comix, drama and film) and representing a wide spectrum of LGBTQ*IA+ experiences and identifications, the course asks how such work has queered the past and explored alternative futures, laying claim to new possibilities for art, politics, and embodied subjectivity.