This course will survey the history and US political contexts of LGBTQ+ identities in popular music over three critical decades. We will cover the 1970s era of gay liberation and visibility with glam rock, first-wave punk, women’s music, and disco; the mainstreaming of queer sensibility in dance pop, new wave, and voguing in the neoliberal 1980s; and 1990s rise of queer theory, AIDS epidemic, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and queer activism reflected in queercore, crypto-queer alternative rock, and coded music videos. We will also consider how these past expressive strategies are referenced and extended in later and current queer pop.

Full details for LGBT 2232 - Queer Pop from the Stonewall Uprising to the Millennium

Dragons? Spaceships? Bodies that change gendered characteristics at will? Vampire archivists? Speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy) imagines the world not as it is but as it should be. It can imagine worlds where trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people thrive without danger or difficulty (and has done so for a long time). What do such worlds look like? How does it feel to read narratives where the gender binary does not work the way it does in our present day? This course surveys very recent trans- and non-binary-authored narratives. Readings may include (Cornell alumna) Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars, Isaac Fellman's Dead Collections (the trans vampire archivists), and short stories by authors like Torrey Peters and Daniel Lavery. Visits from authors being planned.

Full details for LGBT 2535 - Issues in Contemporary Fiction: Trans Utopias and Genderqueer Science Fiction

This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.

Full details for LGBT 2770 - Islam and Gender

This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of “virtual music” since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community.

Full details for LGBT 3318 - Virtual Music

What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read. Taught in English.

Full details for LGBT 3555 - Comics as a Medium

This course engages classical antiquity and its reception through the prism of queer studies. Cruising Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, Ovid and more, we will explore how queer theoretical frameworks help us account for premodern queer and trans bodies, desires, experiences, and aesthetics. We will trace how people historically have engaged with the classical past in political and affective projects of writing queer history and literature, constructing identities and communities, and imagining queer futures. We will unpack how classical scholarship might reproduce contemporary forms of homophobia and transphobia in its treatments of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the classical past, and in turn how modern uses of the classical might reinforce or dismantle exclusionary narratives around 'queerness' today as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, we will consider how the work we are doing in this class (where the 'Queer' in 'Queer Classics' may be taken as an adjective or an imperative) relates to the ways that contemporary writers, activists, artists, and performers have animated the classical past with queer possibilities. All readings will be in translation; no knowledge of Latin and Greek is required.

Full details for LGBT 3635 - Queer Classics

Individual study program intended for juniors and seniors working on special topics with selected reading or research projects not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with an LGBT Studies faculty member who has agreed to supervise independent study.

Full details for LGBT 3990 - Undergraduate Independent Study

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for LGBT 4705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Full details for LGBT 4835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for LGBT 6705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture