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This course surveys British and American Lesbian, Gay, and Queer literature from the 1890s to the present. We will read across genres--letters, novels, autobiographies, plays--exploring approaches to same-sex desire and forms of sexuality that are traditionally deemed transgressive. We will evaluate perspectives from Gay Studies, which typically examines the roles of same-sex desire across and among cultures and histories, and Queer Studies, which perceives sexuality not as biologically determined, instead defining desire itself as a cultural construction. We will read from the following texts, which include a famous love letter, a novel about "homosocial" desire, another about the isolation of lesbian love in the early twentieth century, another about a person who ages 400 years and changes gender, a lesbian memoir, two plays dealing with the AIDS epidemic among gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, gay man's memoir, a scholarly study of lesbians in the twentieth century, and a memoir of a transgendered person. Students should purchase all books, although we will read only sections of some. De Profundis Oscar Wilde King Solomon's Mines Henry Rider Haggard - The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall Orlando: A Biography - Virginia Woolf Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me - Larry Kramer Cures --Martin Duberman Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers - Lillian Faderman She's Not There Jennifer Finney Boylan, |
