LIT 5517-Fall 2025-Sperling

This course takes as a starting position that queer theory has always been about more than/in opposition to queerness as sexual or gender identity. Instead, we will locate key debates and issues in queer theory over the last four decades as sites of interrogation into socially constructed norms and dominant structures of power that shape our gendered and sexual lives, bodies, and experiences. The course will serve as an introduction to the still lively (if not always ending or in fear of being “over”) field of queer theory in the US context, which emerged in its institutional and by now established form around 1990. Charting its historical emergence in response to feminist theory and gay and lesbian studies in the 1980s paralleled with activist movements for sexual, gender, and racial justice that paved its way, we will begin with texts before 1990 to best understand debates that formed the field, before moving into more contemporary queer theory. Topics in the course will include, then, first the field’s emergence in relation to feminism, activism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics, followed by weekly interventions that “queer” topics such as: literary and cultural studies, sex/sexuality, ecology, temporality, affect, the archive, compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy and the couple, childhood, disability, class, aesthetics, geography, race, blackness, gender and settler colonialism, reproduction and the family, science studies, education, and queerness beyond identity.

Readings will include works by many of the following: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Leo Bersani, Heather Love, Tavia Nyong’o, Annamarie Jagose, Matt Brim, Jack Halberstam, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kara Keeling, Donna Haraway, Catriona Sandilands, Jules Gill-Peterson, C. Riley Snorton, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Hortense Spillers, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Susan Stryker, Mel Y. Chen, and Marquis Bey. 

Please note that in this course, we will read primarily theory, one novel, screen one film, and read several supplementary short stories. Reading expectations will be roughly one book per week, and each student will be assigned specific chapters each week to focus on for class discussion. Discussion and regular participation are expected and required in this course. Students need not have any background in reading theory or in queer theory specifically to enroll.