ENGL 556: Trans Studies: Temporality and Historicity
Through the analysis of primarily US-based trans cultural production and trans studies scholarship, this course provides an overview to contemporary trans studies by focusing on the thematic of time: both temporality (the lived experience of time) and historicity (the quality of being situated in time). Questions concerning time have been central to trans studies, and representations of transness (both in popular culture and in trans cultural production) have often been concerned with both historicity and temporality. For example, the medicalization of transness often posits a unidirectional movement or time line from past, present, to future, a future that erases the past. The critique of this temporality was central to early trans studies. Next, transness has often been figured in popular culture as both always already new (and thus without the ontological weight of history) and as a symbol of modernity (the ultimately sign of the self-sovereign individual). Trans studies scholars have been invested in disrupting both these figurations, recovering trans figures prior to “transsexuality” and refusing its racialized connection to modernity. Finally, trans archives are inhabited by many ghosts: those who appear as always already dead, if not murdered. How do these ghosts animate trans and queer cultural production? How does the past haunt the present? How can we do them justice?
In addition to completing the reading and attending class, students complete the following assignments:
- They write 6 informal response papers (called zero drafts).
- They present one “pitch”
- They write one conference-length essay (9-12 pages). This essay is scaffolded: (a) a proposal (b) a rough draft and (c) a final draft.
Keywords: trans, queer, sexuality, sex and gender, race, embodiment, temporality, historicity
Course Materials:
- A coursepack is available from Professional Copy’n’Print on the Ave.
- You will also need a copy of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada and Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster