LIT 5517-Fall 2025-Wilson

“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” an anti-slavery revision of soldiers’ marching song for abolitionist John Brown, cemented Julia Ward Howe’s celebrity when it appeared in an 1862 Atlantic Monthly. Yet, two decades before its publication, 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 Gary Williams curated its fragments as The Hermaphrodite (U of Nebraska P, 2004). Similarly, the lesser-known 1860 narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery offers a rare glimpse of how those who liberated themselves exploited the dehumanizing system’s colorism and gender biases. Using Ward’s vision of a young nation’s quest for a utopian society and the Crafts’ tale as our palimpsests, this course mines works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, and film from the past two centuries and interventions in gender and sexuality studies in search of new insights on the mythologies of the gender binary that bind—and divide—our own contentious moment. In addition to Howe and the Crafts, we will select from works by Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Sui Sin Far, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Christine Jorgensen, Toni Morrison, Leslie Feinberg, Octavia Butler, Daniel Black, and others and the films A Florida Enchantment, Blonde Venus, Some Like It Hot, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Paris Is Burning, Boys Don’t Cry, Moonlight, and Everything Everywhere All at Once to read and screen alongside major contemporary theorists, including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Judith Butler, Leah DeVun, Alice Domurat Dreger, E. Patrick Johnson, Susan Stryker, and C. Riley Snorton.