Special Topics Research Seminar (525-0-33)

Topic

Transgender Studies

Instructors

TJ Billard

Meeting Info

Frances Searle Building 2107: Wed 9:30AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

This course introduces students to the central questions, concepts, and debates that animate contemporary transgender studies. Drawing from scholarship across the humanities, social sciences, and applied fields, we will explore how gender variance is lived, represented, regulated, and resisted in diverse cultural and political contexts. Readings and discussions will address topics such as the social and historical production of gender; trans embodiment and lived experience; race, coloniality, and the global circulation of trans categories; media and cultural representation; law, policy, and the state; health and medicine; and art, activism, and worldmaking. The course emphasizes transgender studies as an interdisciplinary and politically engaged mode of inquiry that connects theory and lived experience, intellectual critique and social transformation. Undergraduate students will develop foundational literacy in the field through close reading, discussion, and applied analysis. Graduate students will extend this work through additional theoretical and methodological readings, a research paper, and facilitation of class discussions.