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Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies (490-0-22)

Topic

Theorizing Black Genders & Sexualities

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 or might be or 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.