Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities (402-0-20)

Instructors

Marquis Bey West

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 215: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

In this course, we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about black women, or black queer (often meaning "gay or lesbian") people, or black transgender people; we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about "masculinity" and "femininity" or "sex" as a regime of reproductive coercion sutured to certain anatomical interpretations. This course will be one that concerns, indeed, black genders and sexualities; black genders, which might be to say gender's fracture and interrogation; black sexualities, which might be to say a questioning of where sexuality is and cannot be located. This course is, in short, the onset—a continued onset—of a reckoning with what genders and sexualities are and mean, in the context of blackness and outside of or adjacent to that context, and how we might undermine, critique, interrogate, depart from, move within, or imagine outside of entirely these categorizations that are ultimately, as this course will show, regimes of whiteness, normativity, and hegemony.

Learning Objectives

• Have a clearer, firmer sense of gender's impact on our lives, social institutions, histories
• Be able to articulate more robustly how you position yourself with respect to gender as a social apparatus, but also with various theories and ideas concerning gender's impact
• Understand the ways that race and gender are intertwined, such that gender is understood as a racialized mode of existence
• Develop a more robust sense of compassion and generosity toward nonnormative expressions and ideas
• Be able to write and think out loud in productive, clear ways concerning black genders and theories of race and gender