ENG 3931 Fall 2023 Wilson

Two decades before she published her polemic indictment of slavery “The Battle of the Republic” in The Atlantic, Julia Ward Howe crafted an incomplete tale of an intersex person—“one presenting a beautiful physical development, and combining in the spiritual nature all that is most attractive in either sex” who would be “the poetic dream of the ancient sculptor, more beautiful, though less human, than either man or woman”—that remained lost in the archive until scholar Gary Williams curated its fragments as Laurence manuscript/The Hermaphrodite (U of Nebraska P, 2004). Using Ward’s fraught utopic vision as a palimpsest, this course will mine a host of genres, alongside formative scholarly interventions in gender studies by Hortense J. Spillers, Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Siobhan Somerville, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, C. Riley Snorton, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, and Roger Reeves, from the last 150 years in search of new insights on the fictions about the binaries that bind—and divide—our own contentious moment, one not unlike Ward’s. In addition to her manuscript, we’ll choose six to eight works among canonical texts such as Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Sherwood Anderson’s “The Man Who Became a Woman,” Djuana Barnes’s Nightwood, Virginia Prince’s Transvestia, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, Pauli Murray’s Dark Testament, Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes, and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning and more recent standouts such as Tarell Alvin McRaney’s Wig Out!, Awkward-Rich’s Dispatch, Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet, torrin a. greathouse’s Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, and the blockbuster phenomenon Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Students must email Dr. Wilson affirming their interest and investment in the sensitive matters in this course before enrollment.

• Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860), Ellen and William Craft, alongside Ilyon Woo’s new Master Slave Husband Wife (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
• The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (Boni & Liveright, 1922)
• Cane, Jean Toomer (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 1923/2011), alongside excerpts from Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Kathleen Pfeiffer (U of Illinois P, 2010)
• “The Man Who Became a Woman,” Sherwood Anderson (Horses and Men, Huebsh, 1923)
• Nightwood, Djuana Barnes (Faber & Faber/New Directions, 1936)
• Excerpts from Transvestia, Virginia Prince (1952, 1960 issues)
• Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood (1953)
• Dark Testament, Pauli Murray (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 1970/2018), w/this 2021 documentary
• Not Vanishing, Chrystos (Press Gang P, 1988, on reserve at Strozier)
• Paris Is Burning (1990)
• Boys Don’t Cry, Kimberly Peirce (1999)
• Wig Out!, Tarell Alvin McRaney (Faber & Faber, 2008)
• Dispatch, Cameron Awkward-Rich (2017, Persea)
• Una Mujer Fantástica, Sebastian Lelio (2017)
• In Full Velvet, Jenny Johnson (2017)
• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, torrin a. greathouse (Milkweed, 2020)
• Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)