First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-21)
Topic
Black queer theory/studies
Instructors
Mark Lockwood
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-329: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM
Overview of class
On October 11th, 2005, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson's seminal anthology Black Queer Studies was published by Duke University Press. The anthology brought together essays by scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality, highlighting the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Following up with his groundbreaking edited collection, Johnson published No Tea, No Shade in 2016. Building on the foundations laid out in Black Queer Studies, No Tea, No Shade spoke new truths about the black queer people, and the black queer experience, whose radical imagination insist on always recalibrating blackness, its embodiment, and performance in an ever-changing political economy.
The goal of this course is to problematize the terms "queer," "gender" and "sexuality," with efforts to question assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in discourse. This course primarily centers three groundbreaking black queer films - Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016), Dee Ree's Pariah (2009), and Kristen Lovell's The Stroll (2023) - as critical, popular, and accessible expressions of black queer theory. We will closely analyze each film alongside other popular culture forms - television shows, performance art, and other visual media - to think about how these texts are in conversation with one another and uncover topics related to black queer genders, sexual practices, vulnerability, queer cultural invisibility, sex work and survival, and LGBTQ kinship. This class will offer students an introduction into black queer theories, analytics, knowledge, and activism that emerge from LGBTQ people of color who examine the intersections of, primarily, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and other vectors of powers and categories of social life. Likewise, this course will expose students to black queer film and media and challenge us, within the academy, to close the gap between popular and academic meditations on black queer life.
Class Attributes
WCAS Writing Seminar
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: PRE-REG: Reserved for Black Studies majors & minors.