Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities (402-0-1)

Instructors

Marquis Bey

Meeting Info

Locy Hall 301: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

In this course, rather than simply discussing black people who fall under a marginalized gender or sexual category—black gay men and lesbians; black transgender people—we will be taking a different, more radical direction. This course will be one that concerns how blackness as a historical, philosophical, poetic force troubles the limits of gender and sexuality such that those terms are rendered inoperable and radically otherwise. Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities, thus, reckons 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

Be able to:
Develop a general theorization of racialized gender in ways that accounts for history, philosophy, and the social

Identify key scholars in black feminism and transgender studies and black queer studies who have shaped the understanding of identity in the 20th and 21st centuries

Class Materials (Required)

All materials will be provided digitally at no cost

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: PRE-REG: Reserved for Black Studies majors & minors.