ENL 491 Queer Theory

3 Credit(s)

Queer theory examines the structures that regulate norms of gender and sexuality and the transgressions that bend and break those norms. It draws from a wide range of critical and theoretical movements, from psychoanalysis to critical race studies. This course focuses on how linguistic, discursive, literary, and cultural interventions perpetuate, reshape, and refuse heteronormativity and the gender binary. It considers issues and theories of identification, representation, normativity, intimacy, and kinship. With an intersectional stance, it explores how gender and sexuality are mutually constituted with such categories and constructions as race, ethnicity, class, ability, and nationality. In this course, the study of theoretical texts will be paired with the analysis of literary works, cultural interventions, and personal and communal acts. Three lecture hours per week.