From “Out for Biden” to “Trump Pride,” both parties’ attempts to win LGBTQIA+ voters during the U.S. presidential elections have made this community more visible and powerful than ever before. However, LGBTQIA+ people came a long way to get here and there is still a long way ahead of them. In this course, we will look at novels, films, tumblrs, magazines, and TV series about American LGBTQIA+ communities and explore the question of how American literary and cultural texts from the 1950s to the present have critically engaged with the construction of American LGBTQIA+ identities. We will read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) through the lens of queer theory to understand how same-sex desires were depicted before the rise of the gay liberation movement. M. Butterfly (1993) and The Wedding Banquet (1993) help us understand how LGBTQIA+ identities are racialized in the United States. We will also read Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) to identify the liberties Millennials enjoy now and the challenges ahead of them.
This course is an online block seminar. The first session will take place before Christmas, and then on two more weekends in January and February; there will also be a preliminary meeting before the end of the exam registration period in early December. We will conclude this course with a workshop presentations of students’ work-in-progress and keynote lectures by Dr. Matthew Boulette (University of Chicago) and Prof. Florian Freitag (UDE).
Texts:
Novels
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room (1956)
Becky Albertalli Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015)
Films
David Cronenberg M. Butterfly (1993)
Ang Lee The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Duncan Tucker Transamerica (1993) |
