Reading Sexuality

<p>Online Course. This course investigates the literary archive of queer and trans desire in America since World War I. Drawing on aesthetic and theoretical texts, we will examine the way sexuality articulates within economic, racial, and political formations. Our historical survey begins with the queer poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and Saidiya Hartman’s speculative Black feminist history of alternative sexualities in the early 20th century. From there we turn to post-World War II visions of sexual difference, from Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol’s camp cosmopolitanism to Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde’s radical feminist intimacies. The course concludes with two interrelated conversations. First, an interrogation of the enmeshment of race, class, and desire in neoliberal America, as explored in Samuel Delaney’s experimental memoir Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, AIDS elegies by Essex Hemphill and John Keene, and philosophical readings by theorists such as Cathy Cohen and Jasbir Puar. Secondly, a comparison of the way Queer Studies and Trans Studies approach questions of embodiment, agency, and the erotics of politics.&#160;1 Credit. Session A: May 27 – June 28. Tuition: $5070. Technology Fee: $85.</p>