Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Full details for LGBT 2760 - Desire

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for LGBT 3740 - Parody

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for LGBT 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance

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

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes queer and trans in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA). (PMA-HTC)

Full details for LGBT 4695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

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. (PMA-HTC)

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

From Sigmund Freud to Magnus Hirschfeld, Michel Foucault to Judith Butler, the 20th century witnessed the development of radically new understandings of gender and sexuality. At the turn of the century, sexual identities were established and contested in the emergent sciences of sexology, psychoanalysis, and ethnography, as well as in literary and visual representations. With the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, the very notion of identity categories was thrown into question. The seminar considers how boundaries between normativity and nonnormativity were continually redrawn in the course of the 20th century through scientific case studies, theoretical texts, literary works, and political speeches. Students will gain an understanding of the historical arc of foundational debates in feminist and queer theory by considering canonical sources as well as the marginalized perspectives of women, working-class, and trans authors. We will examine the relationship between sexual taxonomization and pathologization, as well as the entanglement of Western sexual identities in eugenics discourses and colonial projects.

Full details for LGBT 6336 - The Science and Fiction of Sexuality