ENGL 556 B: Cultural Studies

Queer and trans studies are grounded in a critique of scientific approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality, which have been historically entangled with scientific racism. This course provides an overview of queer and trans studies scholarship, reading the field through this lens. Together we explore the relations between medicalization, scientific modes of knowing, state and institutional violence, and embodied experience. While the course focuses on scholarship, we also develop analyses of recent and historical scientific writing, reading science as culture. Our analyses develop within the context of a pandemic, so we are attentive to the politics of doubt and the critique of scientific authority. Readings include both recent and canonical work, including texts by Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Katherine McKittrick, C. Riley Snorton, Kyla Schuller, and Jules Gill-Peterson. Students write weekly, low-stake responses. They conclude the quarter by writing either a longer seminar paper or two public-facing essays that draw on course material to analyze an object of their choice.