5-College LGBT Courses
Fall 2008
Amherst College
Queer Fictions
ENGL 59 -01
Instructor: John Cameron
Meets: TTh 2:00-3:20
The period 1880 to 1920 appears to have been the moment of the emergence of modern sexuality in American and European culture and literature. The representation of proliferating forms of erotic desire, often veiled or coded, found rich and complex articulation in the discourse of literary modernism. The course will take advantage of recent historical and theoretical work (Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler and others) to approach writing by Melville, Cather, Henry James, R.L. Stevenson, Wilde, Forster, Lawrence, Woolf, Gide, Mann, Colette, and others. Attention will be paid to the work of Sigmund Freud in this period as being perhaps the queerest fiction of all. Fall semester.
Mount Holyoke College
Anthropology and Sexualities
ANTHR 331-01
Instructor: Lynn Morgan
Meets: T 1:15-4:05
This seminar focuses on contemporary anthropological scholarship concerned with the varieties of sexual expression in diverse cultural settings. We will read ethnographic accounts of sexual ideologies and the politics and practices of sexuality in Brazil, Japan, Native North America, India, and elsewhere. We will examine anthropological theories of sexuality with an emphasis on contemporary issues, including performance theory, 'third gender' theories, sexual identity formulation, and techniques used by various societies to discipline the body.
Bodily Desires
HIST 301-04/GNDST 333-01
Instructor: Jane Gerhard
Meets: 1:15-4:05
In this seminar, we will study the history of sexuality, desire, and bodies. The premise of this interdisciplinary seminar is that sexuality is both historically constructed (fluid and changing over time and culture) and embodied and lived (experienced for many as essential and unchanging). We will study experts who set out terms and frameworks for understanding modern sexuality; how in different ways and in different times communities of sexual minorities strategically used selected elements of expert discourse to forge their own narratives of self and desire. Students will examine sexual classifications--mainstream and 'normal' or subcultural and 'deviant'--as mutually constructed.
Smith College
Queer Theories/ Queer Cultures
SWG 200-01-LEC
Instructor: Daniel Rivers
Meets: TTh 1:00-2:00
This course will offer an introduction to the central historical and contemporary issues, concerns, and debates in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) studies. Using the course readings, film screenings, and class discussions, we will challenge ourselves to complicate our understandings of seemingly natural ideas such as sex/gender, man/woman or homosexual/heterosexual, as we experience them in our own daily lives and perceive them in the world around us. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore the history, critical theory, cultural production, and politics of queer life in the United States, as well as queer identities in a transnational diasporic context. We will pay particular attention to how ideas of gender and sexuality intersect with social understandings of race, class, and citizenship. Prerequisite SWG 150.
Queer Resistances: Identities, Communities, and Social Movements
SWG 312-01-SEM
Instructor: Nancy Whittier
Meets: TH 1:00-2:50
How do we know what it means to identify as lesbian, gay, queer, bisexual, or transgender? Why do these terms mean different things to different people and in different contexts? How does claiming or refusing to claim a sexual identity affect community formation or social change? This seminar will explore constructions of queer collective identities, communities, and social protest. We will pay explicit attention to how queer identities, communities, and movements are racialized, shaped by class, gendered, and contextual. Drawing on historical, theoretical, narrative, and ethnographic sources, we will examine multiple sites of queer resistance including local communities, academic institutions, media, the state, social movement organizations, and the Internet. We will examine the consequences of various theories of gender, sexuality, and resistance for how we interpret the shapes that queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity, community, and social movements take. Prerequisites: SWG 150, one additional course in the major and permission of the instructor.
Seminar in Political Theory: Queer Theory
GOV 367-01-SEM
Instructor: Gary Lehring
Meets: T 3:00-4:50
Topics course. This course introduces students to the emerging interdisciplinary field of queer theory. This is often a perplexing task as there is no real consensus on the definitional limits of queer. Indeed, many scholars believe the inability to define these limits is one of queer theory's greatest strengths. "Queer" can function as a noun, an adjective or a verb, but in each case it is defined against the 'normal' or normalizing. Queer theory is not a singular or systematic conceptual or methodological framework. Rather it is a collection of intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desire. As such, it is hard to call queer theory a school of thought, as it has a very unorthodox and often disrespectful view of "discipline." Queer theory, then, describes a diverse range of critical practices and priorities: analyses of same-sex sexual desire in literary texts, film or music; exploration of the social and political power relations of sexuality; critiques of the sex-gender system; studies of transgender identification, or sadomasochism and of transgressive desire.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Sexuality and Society
SOC 387
Instructor: Amy Schalet
Meets: Section 1 -- MWF 11:15-12:05, Section 2 -- TTh 2:30-3:45
The many ways in which social factors shape sexuality. Focus on cultural diversity, including such factors as race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity in organizing sexuality in both individuals and social groups. Also includes adolescent sexuality; the invention of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality; the medicalization of sexuality; and social theories about how people become sexual. Prerequisite: 100-level Sociology course. (Gen.Ed. SB, U)
