Topics in Gender and Sexuality Studies (390-0-20)
Topic
Queer Kinship: Making and Breaking 'The Family'
Instructors
Ryan Nhu
Meeting Info
Locy Hall 314: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM
Overview of class
How does family nurture and threaten queerness—and how do queers nurture and threaten the figure of "the family"? In this course we will examine the social, cultural, and political tensions between desires for sexual freedom, on one hand, and desires for kinship, on the other. Turning to contemporary queer American literature as our guide, and drawing inspiration from discussions within feminist, queer, and critical race theory, we will investigate the similarities and differences between heteronormative, privatized forms of intimate relation and alternative, queer modes of mutual aid and just distribution. Taking a cue from writer Maggie Nelson's memoir The Argonauts, we will ask, "When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements, and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship?"
Over the span of the course, we will read an array of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction that traces an arc from coming out ("breaking the family") to choosing queer kin ("making the family") and finally to abolishing the institution of the family altogether (back to "breaking the family"). At stake in our inquiry is an attempt 1) to better understand whether queer kinship ever really transcends the oppressive protocols of the family; and, perhaps most urgently, 2) to imagine practices of queer care and sustenance that might persist in an age threatening to retract freedoms concerning same-sex marriage and intimacy, queer adoption, and gender-expansive healthcare and reproductive technologies.
Learning Objectives
- To practice the basic skills of close reading, interpretation, and analysis
- To improve writing and speaking as literary and cultural critics
- To learn how to recognize the ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are embedded in aesthetic form
- To study and describe how gender, sexual, class, and racial ideology are shaped by American history and culture
· To unpack the historically entangled struggles for sexual freedom and queer family-making
Students will leave the course with fluency on the topics of the relation between desire and identification; non-biological notions of reproduction and family; literature/culture as a site for reimagining social relations; and the history and politics of queer kin-making in the United States.
Teaching Method
Lecture, guest speakers, online work, discussion, presentations, writing assignments
Evaluation Method
Attendance/class participation, weekly reading reflections, papers, final presentation
Class Materials (Required)
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (ISBN: 9780593133385)
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (ISBN: 9781555977351)
The Breaks by Julietta Singh (ISBN: 9781566896160)
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico ( ISBN: 9781941040638)
all other texts will be provided on Canvas