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Thurs. 4/7 – Proposal Peer Review

For today’s asynchronous work, we’ll be partnering up for a quick peer review of your final project proposals. Hopefully you’ve been in a class where you’ve done a helpful, successful review of a peer’s paper before, but if not, this chapter from Writing Spaces by Ron DePeter offers some great tips for giving good feedback on your classmates’ work.

Please find your name and your peer review partner’s name on the list below. Then, share your proposal with them by 12pm on Friday 4/8. Read over your partner’s proposal, leaving comment bubbles in the margins as well as a short note at the end of the proposal summarizing your thoughts. All commenting should be completed before class on Tuesday 4/12.(I’m giving you some extra time on this.) In your comments…

  • ask questions about your partner’s project (the format, organization, topic, ways they’re using theory, how they’re analyzing the text(s) they’ve chosen, main argument, etc. etc.)
  • make suggestions for how your partner might address essential aspects of the assignment
  • make suggestions for how your partner might approach a potential problem or issue you’ve identified that they may run into
  • point out aspects of their project that you’re excited about and that seem interesting to you

Peer Review Partners:

  • Ashlee (ashlee.hurley43@gmail.com) and Maya (maya.abodunde@gmail.com)
  • Charlie (charliestoner117@gmail.com) and Kayla (kayladiee360@gmail.com)
  • Cora (Hillcora2000@gmail.com) and Maria (mturker8875@gmail.com)
  • Dana (weissdana0@gmail.com) and Kora (arokcm00@gmail.com)
  • Danielle (danielleteaches11@gmail.com) and Ryan (ryrykoster17@gmail.com)
  • Dean (dvspin10@gmail.com) and Teryn (thardyrr@gmail.com)
  • Izabelle (Izabelle.Weisman19@gmail.com) and Kristi (Wenger.kristi@gmail.com)
  • Jake (jm.lombardo17@gmail.com) and Michaela (mbennett4414@gmail.com)

On Tuesday we’ll discuss any questions you have about the next steps of the project as you begin working on your first drafts (due 4/21). We’ll also be discussing Robert McRuer and the intersections between disabilities and queerness.

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Thurs. 3/31

On Tuesday, as we read Jasbir Puar’s work on homonationalism, queer exceptionalism, and queer assemblages, we discussed the complexities that arise when we explore the intersections and clashes between queerness and other marginalized identities. In our reading today from Jose Munoz’s book, Disidentifications, we can see this theme arising again as Munoz addresses the realities and possibilities that come with being a queer person of color in a white heterosexual dominant culture.

For Munoz, disidentification is a tool, a sort of in between space that many people occupy out of necessity in order to survive, a reality that breaks down the binary of good/bad or essentialist/constructivist identity formations. A few quotes stand out to me as being helpful in explaining the concept:

Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship. (4)

In other words, disidentification is meant as a negotiation mechanism, a survival tool to help marginalized folks navigate the dominant culture around them. Also:

To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. (12)

So, disidentification allows marginalized individuals (particularly, for Munoz’s purposes, queer people of color) to see themselves in the world around them. Perhaps most clarifying for me is this moment from the text, though:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)

As we can see, then, disidentification isn’t about connecting with a dominant culture that neglects and rejects marginalized beings; but it’s also not about rebelling against it completely in a way that further marginalizes those people. It’s about making a new meaning and representations. Disidentification is about queering the culture and society around oneself. Like so many of Munoz’s ideas, it’s an intrinsically hopeful, positive way of thinking.

A few years back, a blogger on Black Girl Dangerous posted some great examples of disidentifications on the occasion of Munoz’s death. (As Teryn and Izabelle pointed out in their presentation, Munoz was absolutely beloved by the queer academic and activist communities and by scholars and activists of color.) For our reading response today, in a 2-3 page document in your Google Drive folder, I’d like you to write about instances of disidentifications you can think of that have manifested recently in contemporary pop culture. Where have we seen traditionally white- or straight-coded characters, figures, trends, etc. that have been “disidentified” in some way? How has that disidentification impacted the overall text/film/music/artwork/etc.? Offer specific examples from the text in your analysis, and build in connections to our reading from Munoz in your response.

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Thurs. 3/24

On Tuesday, we discussed the connections between Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and the other feminist texts we’ve read over the past two weeks. Today, we’ll be wrapping up our discussion of Lorde’s text by revisiting some of the ideas we went over in class on Tuesday. We noted that Lorde referred to her book as a “biomythography” and we discussed that as a common genre we’ve confronted throughout our course so far. We also talked a bit about how Lorde introduces the book as a piece describing her relationship to the women who have made her her own person.

For your reading response today, in a document in your Google Drive folder, please describe some of the moments from the text, particularly the latter half of the book, when you see Lorde mythologizing the impact women have had on her life. (During our class discussion, I gave the examples of the way she discusses her mother early in the book – the way she walks down the street, the way the two of them cuddled in bed together, her mother as an air warden during WWII. What examples come to mind from later in the text?) How does she use mythology in her text? Where do we see the mythological elements coming into play? Is she direct or indirect in her use of “magic,” as we’ve seen in other queer stories this semester? And how does that impact the audience, and her story, differently? Please point to at least three specific examples from different moments in the text, analyzing them in your response.

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Thurs. 2/24

First, I want to thank you all again for your patience as I rearranged everything for my family emergency and to thank you all for your condolences. I’m looking forward to getting us all back on track and to seeing you all in the classroom again this upcoming Tuesday!

For today, I’ve asked you to read a classic piece by Susan Sontag on the idea of campiness and to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a classic example of a film that relies on camp-based humor. We’ve all confronted the idea of campiness at some point in time – probably through things like animated TV series or cheesey comedies. It’s hard to define (much like queer theory!) but we know it when we see it. Sontag’s examples are dated, but they still hold true, and if you compare t hem to some more recent examples from this Time article that came out in response to the Met Gala in 2019, you can see connections to the aesthetic – everything is purposefully outrageous and playful. (Here are some more great recent examples from a similar article in W Magazine, although I don’t necessarily agree with all the celebrity commentary.)

Camp in and of itself isn’t a queer concept. However, its ability to take the everyday and exaggerate it or suppress it ties it to the way drag performers play with the concept of gender. Sontag also draws connections between queerness and camp throughout her essay. “Camp is solvent of morality,” she says. “It neutralizes moral indignation and sponsors playfulness.” Camp offers an outlet for being loud, extreme, outrageous, joyful – all things that queerness is not always welcome to be, if we think about Butler’s idea of the heterosexual matrix and the way it controls so much of everyday expectations of us as gendered beings. Camp sometimes gets left off of queer theory syllabi because of its less-serious, less-theoretical connections to literature, music, philosophy, art, and film. But, like Halberstam (who we’ll be discussing on Tuesday) I think it’s really important to recognize the aspects of pop culture that are less serious as they often offer a more uplifting, positive representation of queerness. (Or, if not, at least it offers a more complete picture of queerness than the overly-serious/overly-academic ones painted in highly theoretical texts.)

Something particularly interesting to me about Rocky Horror Picture Show as an example of camp is the cult following its gathered since it came out as a stage play in London in 1973. The play is still performed across the globe, with audiences getting dressed up in costume, bringing props, and yelling out callbacks throughout performances. Here’s a great short video about the London fan experience, here’s one describing what to expect if you go to see your first RHPS live show, and here’s a guide to the props and callbacks, for anyone who might be interested in the future. (I believe Dana said there would be a live student performance on campus sometime soon!) It strikes me that a show dripping with camp, openly discussing non-heteronormative gender performance and bisexuality, that came out in the early 1970s (a time when people were much less accepting than today), became such an iconic part of pop culture.

For today’s writing, I’d like us to work on identifying some of the aspects of camp Sontag points out in RHPS as a way of pinning down our own definitions of the term. In 2-3 pages in your Google Drive folder, point to 3-5 of Sontag’s notes and explain how you see them manifesting in RHPS. For example, if you look at #18 in Sontag’s list, do you think RHPS exhibits unintentional camp? If so, how? If it’s deliberate, how is it done well? Or, for another example, if you choose #36, how do you see RHPS avoiding “identifying with extreme states of feeling”?

On Tuesday, we’ll discuss Halberstam, low theory, failure, and maybe some SpongeBob (or Finding Nemo – I haven’t decided yet). See you all then! 🙂

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Thurs. 2/10

As some of you noted at the end of class on Tuesday: So much fruit in this book!! But hopefully that wasn’t too distracting and you were able to enjoy the complex story that unfurled throughout Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry. The dual narratives of Jordan’s and the Dog Woman’s perspectives combined with the multiple timelines and re-told fairytales mean that there is a lot to unpack in a book that isn’t very long at all.

I chose to read this at this after finishing up our Butler readings because of the way Winterson plays with gender, the passage of time, and other heteronormative constructs. This is also a book about, among many other things, rebirth and renewal (hence the title, if anyone knows what it means to “sex” a plant in gardening terminology), and I think there’s a lot there that can be connected to drag culture and gender performativity.

For your asynchronous work today, I’d like you to do some reflective writing about the book’s connections to Butler. In 2-3 pages in a document in your Google Drive folder, reflect upon where we see Winterson playing with heteronormative concepts (gender roles, gendered stereotypes, etc.) in the book. How do we see characters living subversively and not adhering to heteronormative frameworks? How does the book itself push against norms – could we say that Winterson was “queering” the typical novel in some way as she put this book together? If so, how?

For Tuesday, we’ll be reading Halberstam on “low theory” and failure as we move into a section of the course on playfulness, humor, and campiness in queer theory. There’s some campiness in Sexing the Cherry, too, which we’ll discuss.

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Thurs. 2/3

Phew! We made it through the first half of Judith Butler, and by the time you’re reading this, you’ve hopefully read through the second selection from her. Butler’s work is challenging, as we said in class, but her ideas really give us different perspectives on gender and sex and what it means to perform identity in the world. (You’ll also be pleased to hear that, while these are not the last two readings that will make your head hurt, they are the last two that feature such dense sentence structures. So yay! We’ve made it through what I would consider to be some of the most difficult readings. 🙂 )

In class Tuesday we watched a few clips of Paris is Burning (1987), the documentary by Jennie Livingston which Butler writes about directly in one of the chapters of Bodies that Matter we read for today as part of her discussion of gender performance and heteronormativity. We also watched clips from the FX show Pose (2018-2021), which is set in 1987 and is based off of Paris is Burning. In case you’d like to rewatch some of those clips, here’s what we watched and where to find them, along with a couple clips we didn’t have time to watch together that go along with Butler’s discussion of bodies, realness, heteronormativity, and gender performance:

  • You can find the PiB in its entirety on AppleTV. (I highly recommend it!)
  • PiB: What is a Ball? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbv6OR1Fzpk
  • PiB: What is a House? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qWaAS3olWQ
  • PiB: What is a Category? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITnguCPHBI
  • PiB: What is Realness? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpt37S3wL8
  • Pose is on Netflix, the FX streaming platform, and can be paid for per episode on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, and AppleTV. (Content warning: sex and nudity.)
    1. Pose Season 1: Episode 1, up to opening title sequence – “mopping” the museum and walking the royalty category; Blanca is called a “cross dresser” by her sisters
    2. Pose Season 1: Episode 4, up to opening title sequence – Candy walks a luscious body category; Candy’s realness is called into question; heteronormative body standards
    3. Pose Season 1: Episode 4, 15:40-21:23 – Elektra confronts her boyfriend/benefactor about wanting a transition operation in order to be her true self; Candy stays true to her perception of who she wants to be; misogyny and heteronormativity abound!
    4. Pose Season 1: Episode 8, 37:25-43:13 – battle between House of Ferocity and House of Evangelista; categories that include different types of gender performance and levels of realness; Pray Tell’s commentary on realness and femininity/masculinity

In Bodies that Matter, Butler writes:

The compulsion to repeat an injury is not necessarily the compulsion to repeat the injury in the same way or to stay fully within the traumatic orbit of that injury. The force of repetition in language may be the paradoxical condition by which a certain agency—not linked to a fiction of the ego as master of circumstance—is derived from the impossibility of choice. It is in this sense that Irigaray’s critical mime of Plato, the fiction of the lesbian phallus, and the rearticulation of kinship in Paris Is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims…. There is no subject prior to its constructions, and neither is the subject determined by those constructions; it is always the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute the “we” cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they be followed in strict obedience. It is the space of this ambivalence which opens up the possibility of a reworking of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds — and fails to proceed. (84)

I want us to think more about Butler’s idea drag and of “repeating” gender norms as a subversive act that sometimes goes wrong as happened with Venus Extravaganza in Paris is Burning (sorry – Butler gave a major spoiler there, folks). Let’s consider this in terms of what we watched on Tuesday as well as other instances of drag and subversive gender performance we see in pop culture.

For our Moodle discussion board post today, please find one (or two, if you’d like) music videos, scenes from TV or films, or other performances where performers have used drag subversively. So we’re not talking about the kind of non-subversive drag Butler discusses from straight performers like we see in Mrs. Doubtfire or White Girls or Madea’s Family Reunion. Think more along the lines of David Bowie in “Boys Keep Swinging” (1979) or Lil Nas X in “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” (2021) or Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu in “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2012). Respond to the following questions in your post: Where do you see connections between the music videos, scenes, etc. and Butler’s argument about drag as a subversive act? What is remarkable about the way the artist or actor is performing gender in the piece? What makes the gender performance subversive? How is the artist or actor messing with heteronormative ideas of gender? If possible, try to include links to the video or scene so others can watch it as they reply to your post. We’ll talk about your posts and watch some of these videos in class on Tuesday.

Remember that for Tuesday, we’ll be discussing your annotations on Gayle Rubin’s “Of Catamites and Kings” after listening to Maria’s presentation on Rubin, and will be discussing the first section up to p. 44, stopping before “The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,” of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry. I’m looking forward to our conversation! 🙂

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Thurs. 1/27

It was lovely to see everyone in person on Tuesday! And thanks for such a great class discussion! We covered a lot of ground, from the truthiness of Sedgwick’s axioms to her idea of “the closet” and current conceptions of coming out, to David’s struggle with coming out to himself and the subsequent impacts that has on the settings and characters around him in the first part of Giovanni’s Room. For today’s work, I’d like us to work on one of the exercises we didn’t have time for in class, and to address some of the themes of taboo and transgression we began to discuss, now that you have finished the second half of Baldwin’s novel.For the prompts below, please respond

Part I: The 1950s, Queer Folks, and Medical Rhetoric

As we began discussing the first part of Giovanni’s Room, the word “shame” came up in our conversation a few times. David clearly is struggling to accept a major part of himself, and that continues throughout the second half of the book as he explores his relationship with Giovanni further. On Tuesday, I handed out a speech from 1957 given by Dr. Albert Ellis, a medical doctor and straight “ally” arguing for the need for greater tolerance and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. His argument is posed by laying out steps for how queer folks can make themselves more acceptable to straight folks. (…Remember, this was the ’50s…) The speech features some of the medical rhetoric very common to the period in discussions of the LGBTQ+ community. (For more on some of the harmful ways that type of rhetoric impacted queer folks throughout their lives, take a look at Queer Literacies by my dissertation advisor, Mark McBeth. It’s a sad read at times, but so, so excellent.) After reading reading through Ellis’s speech, I’m wondering where you can see connections between the that diagnostic rhetoric and the recurring elements of shame seen in Giovanni’s Room? How does shame get tangled up in the book with David trying to “fix” himself? Conversely, is there another healing going on in the book, counter to this institutionalized version alluded to in Ellis’s speech?

*If you don’t have the hard copy of the speech from our handout, here is the PDF.*

Part II: Taboo and Transgression Throughout the Novel

We talked a lot about transgression and taboo when we discussed Foucault, and those words came up again in our reading of Sedgwick. Where do we see those ideas popping up in Baldwin’s text, particularly in the second half of the book? How do they operate as major themes in the novel? As a result, how can we start to read Baldwin through the lens of Foucault’s theories of sexual production and repression?

We’ll be discussing Judith Butler next week, with Dana giving us our first theory presentation on Tuesday. Butler focuses on embodiment and conceptions of gender and sex in society. If you have any questions or need any help understanding the readings, feel free to see me during my office hours or to schedule a meeting with me. I’m happy to help! 🙂

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Thurs. 1/20

On Tuesday, I mentioned that I’d be asking you to take a look at some speeches from early LGBTQ+ rights activists, but I think I’ll set that aside for our work together next week. (I know the Sedgwick reading is a bit dense so I don’t want to assign more reading on top of that for you today.) Instead, I have a few synthesizing questions I’d like you to discuss in small groups on Moodle to build connections between Foucault and Sedgwick:

Both Foucault and Sedgwick are laying out hypotheses in their books. Foucault’s focuses on the production of sexuality in society, while Sedgwick’s focuses more specifically on the binary of homosexual vs heterosexual desire in Western history and culture. In the chapter we’ve read, Sedgwick lays out axioms or truths as a groundwork for the tests she puts to her hypothesis later in the book in the chapters we won’t be reading this semester. (I highly recommend reading at least chapter one, “Epistemology of the Closet,” if you’re interested in reading more queer theory after this class, as it’s essential – it was just a bit too long for me to assign on top of “Axioms.”) As I mentioned in some of my introductory comments, Sedgwick’s axioms seems rather simplistic on the surface, but are more complex than they seem. For our discussion board post today, I’d like you and your group to think about a particular axiom in the context of today’s views of sexuality as well as what we learned from Foucault. Do we think the axiom itself holds up? Do we think Sedgwick’s 1990 explanation of the axiom holds up, or have circumstances changed even if the axiom hasn’t? Is it still a “truth,” or do we think that’s too lofty a term for it? If you’re not sure, explain some of the questions you have or your thinking behind your lack of surety. (It’s okay not to have a definitive answer. 🙂 ) I have some guidelines for my expectations for discussion board posts here, just FYI.

Axiom #2 Group: Kayla, Kora, Charlie, Danielle

Axiom #3 Group: Michaela, Jake, Dana

Axiom #4 Group: Teryn, Izabelle, Kristi, Ryan

Axiom #5 Group: Ken, Dean, Maria

Axiom #7 Group: Maya, Cora, Ashlee

Since I’m posting this so late, your responses won’t be due until Saturday.

Remember that for Tuesday, we’ll be reading the first half of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. See you on campus in Seay 301! 🙂

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Thurs. 1/13

Thanks for a wonderful first class on Tuesday, everyone! Hopefully you’ve all received your invitation to a shared Google Drive folder for your assignments this semester, and you’ve all been able to access our readings on Perusall. If you’ve had any trouble, please reach out and let me know.

Since we’re still getting settled, I have just a couple questions for you to respond to independently for today. In a document in your Google Drive folder for the class labeled with today’s date, reflect on these questions in 2-3 pages or so. (Please note: I am not a stickler for word counts or page counts. I’m just offering that as a rough suggestion. 🙂 ) This should be completed by Friday at 11pm. (I’m giving you some extra time since I’m posting this so last-minute. Normally, our Thursday asynchronous work will be due by 11pm on Thursdays as we agreed upon during our first class.)

  1. Revisit your in-class writing from Tuesday. After completing the readings from McCann and Monaghan and Berlant and Warner for today, how have your definitions of “queering” and “theory” changed? What new questions come up for you about these key terms after reading through Berlant and Warner’s piece in particular, given how they grapple with queer theory’s inability to be defined?
  2. McCann and Monaghan ask some good questions at the end of their chapter that I’d like you to respond to: How does queer ‘theory’ compare to queer ‘politics’ and ‘identity’? Do these uses involve different ideas of what queer means, or do they share common goals?” These questions address ideas we’ll return to throughout the semester, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts now, at the start of the semester, after just starting to be introduced to the idea of queer theory.

We’ll jump in feet first next week with some theoretical readings from Michel Foucault for Tuesday (1976) and Eve Sedgwick (1990) for Thursday, both of whom are a little dense but extremely interesting in their discussions of repression, power, love, and sexuality. When you start reading, start thinking about the way the idea of “normalcy” starts popping up in their writing; we’ll be returning to that idea over and over this semester in different ways.