The last fifty years have seen vast changes in gender and sexual politics in the United States: bar windows have been broken, bras burned, homosexuality decriminalized, marriage equality legalized. Taking these changes as cause for concern instead of markers of progress, our course queries how feminist and queer scholarship has developed alongside this shifting sociopolitical landscape.

The central aim of this discussion-based seminar is to examine the key debates, questions, and issues animating feminist and queer theories of the last century. More expansive than exhaustive, the course analyzes its titular theories through legal studies, performance studies, critical geography, area studies, and more. The texts that will inform our work are organized thematically to generate conversations amongst authors across time, space, and discipline. Our first section will focus on the relationships between gender and sexuality and colonialism, racist hierarchies, and patriarchal social structures. Section two will track their (re)conceptualizations in relation to ethno-racial difference, class standing, and citizenship. Continuing, we will evaluate feminist and queer politics in the face of globalization, (neo)liberalism, and race- and area-based studies, before concluding with careful attention to emergent scholarship that denaturalizes gender binaries, human-object relations, and mind-body/thought-feeling dichotomies.

Subtending this work will be the following questions, as they orbit around feminist and queer academic projects: what are the historical contexts and activist projects that have sparked and sustained queer and feminist theories? What are the stakes behind their solidification as fields of study—who and what has been left out, misread, misrepresented? What can feminist and queer theories do now, in a time when LGBT rights are mainstream, gender binaries have come undone, and “love is love”? What problematics must future generations of queer and feminist scholars contend with?