First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-20)

Topic

Black Queer Studies

Instructors

Mark Lockwood

Meeting Info

University Hall 118: 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. We will closely analyze films 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. Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required