Current Courses
First Year Studies: The Invention of Homosexuality
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
Different historians trace the invention of modern homosexuality to different historical moments, from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The invention of heterosexuality, it would seem, followed after. Certainly the term "heterosexuality” appeared only after the term "homosexuality” was coined, in the later nineteenth century. Neither meant, at first, what they mean today. In this course, we will study the development of modern understandings of same-sex desire in relation to understandings of sex, gender, race, class, nation, nature, culture, and opposite-sex desire. We will be drawing centrally on literary works, especially novels, which have been crucial sites for the construction and dissemination of modern understandings of sexuality. But we will also be reading histories, science, laws, letters and polemics and watching films. Although we will be considering both earlier and more recent materials, we will focus on the period from the 1880’s to the 1960’s. By the 1880’s, almost everyone agrees, a recognizably modern understanding of homosexuality was becoming available. The sexual/cultural landscapes that subsequently developed were not radically rearranged until the 1960’s, when the gay and women’s liberation movements insisted on a political analysis of sexuality. This course will serve as an introduction to a broad range of modern literature, to fundamental works in the history of sexuality and contemporary lesbian/gay/queer studies, and to critical thinking about how we talk, read, and write about sex. Conference work may be focused on any period from the nineteenth century to the present.
Queer Theory: A History
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
Queer Theory emerged in the United States, in tandem with the activism of Queer Nation, at the beginning of the 1990’s, as the intellectual framework for a new round in ongoing contests over understandings of sexuality and gender in Western culture. "Queer” was presented as a radical break with homosexual as well as heterosexual pasts. Queer theorists and activists hoped to reconstruct lesbian and gay politics, intellectual life, and culture; renegotiate differences of gender, race, and class among lesbians and gay men; and establish new ways of thinking about sexuality, new understandings of sexual dissidence, and new relations among sexual dissidents. Nevertheless, Queer Theory had complex sources in the intellectual and political work that had gone before. And it has had, predictably, unpredictable effects on subsequent intellectual and political projects. This course will make the history of Queer Theory the basis for an intensive study of contemporary intellectual and political work on sexuality and gender. We will also be addressing the fundamental questions raised by the career of Queer Theory, about the relations between political movements and intellectual movements, the politics of intellectual life, and the politics of the academy, in the United States in particular, in this new millennium.
Pretty, Witty, and Gay
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
Are you ready to review your cultural map? As Gertrude Stein once said, "Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable. But not literary sex, because sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.” More recently, Fran Leibowitz observed, "If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” We do not have to limit ourselves to America, however. The only question is where to begin: in the pantheon, in prison, or "in the family”; in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York; with the "friends of Dorothy” or "the twilight women”? There are novels, plays, poems, essays, songs, films, and critics, to be read and read about, listened to, or watched. There are dark hints, delicate suggestions, "positive images,” "negative images,” and sympathy-grabbing melodramas to be reviewed. There are high-culture and high-camp tragedies and comedies, the good, the bad, and the awful, to be enjoyed and assessed. How has modern culture thought about sexuality and art, love and literature? How might we think again? Conference work can be focused on a particular artist, set of texts, or genre, or some aspect of the historical background of the mate rials we will be considering.
Courses Offered in Recent Years
City of Feeling
2007-2008
Female couples in nineteenth-century New England were said to live in "Boston marriages"; Whitman aspired to a "city of friends"; Proust anatomized "the cities of the plain"; Baldwin's all-American boy fled to Paris to have his fears confirmed by Giovanni's love. Contemporary lesbian and gay scholars describe the development of urban communities as crucial to the history of modern lesbian and gay cultures and politics. Contemporary queer geographers have begun to map what they are calling "queer space," which is most often either urban or understood in relation to the urban. In this course we will be tracing the interdependent development of modern understandings of homosexualities and of cities, within the framework of a wide-ranging discussion of modern histories of sexuality, the city, gender and space. At the intersection of queer studies and urban studies--with Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Samuel Delany (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue), as presiding godmother and godfather--this class will bring together classic works on the cultures of cities, lesbian/gay/queer urban histories and community studies, new analyses of "place" in urban studies and of "queer space" in geography and cultural studies, novels and film. From Paris and Berlin to Buffalo and Wyoming, we will be considering "the country" and "the suburbs" as they help define "the city"; great cities, global cities, industrial cities, simulated cities; public and private space, the street and domestic life, anonymity and home.
Virginia Woolf in the Twentieth Century
2006-2007
"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf observed, "human character changed. . . . All human relations shifted--those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature." In her novels, essays, reviews, biographies, and polemics, as well as in her diaries, letters, and memoirs, Woolf charted, and fostered, the cultural and political forces behind those changes, as they developed across the century. Over the course of that century Woolf's image also changed, from that of the "invalid lady of Bloomsbury," a modern, a madwoman, and perhaps a genius, to that of a monster, a feminist, a socialist, and a lesbian. She became an icon. While focusing on the development of her writing, we will also consider her life and its interpretation, her politics and their implications, and the use of her art and image by others as points of reference for new work of their own. Her family, friends, lovers, and critics will all appear. We will also be reading her precursors, her peers and those who took up her work and image in the decades after her death, in fiction, theater, and film. This course will serve as an introduction to twentieth century fiction, feminist literary study, lesbian/gay/queer studies, the study of sexuality and the study of politics in literature. Conference projects might focus on one other writer, a range of other writers, or one of these approaches to literary analysis.
Queer Americans
2006-2007
Queer Americans certainly, James, Stein, Cather and Baldwin each fled "America." James (1843-1916) and Stein (1874-1946) spent their adult lives in Europe. Cather (1873-1947) left Nebraska for Greenwich Village--after a decade in Pittsburgh, with a judge's daughter, along the way. Baldwin (1924-1987) left Harlem for Greenwich Village, then the Village for Paris. As sexual subjects and as writers these four could hardly appear more different, yet Stein described James as "the first person in literature to find the way to the literary methods of the twentieth century," Cather rewrote James in developing her own subjects and methods, and Baldwin found in James's writings frameworks for his own. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, James, Stein, and Cather witnessed the emergence of modern understandings of homosexuality and made modern literature, each pushing boundaries always, in subtle or dramatic ways. (Stein, for example, managed to parlay the story of her Paris life with Alice B. Toklas into an American bestseller in 1933.) In the second half of the twentieth century, Baldwin began to dismantle modern understandings of sexuality and of literature. Examining the development of their works side by side will allow us to push the boundaries of lesbian/gay/queer cultural analyses by pursuing different meanings of "queer" and "American" through an extraordinary range of subjects and forms. Beginning with James on old New York and older forms of vulnerability and ruthlesness, this course will range from Cather's plantations and pioneers to Stein on art and atom bombs and Baldwin on sex and civil rights. We will read novels, novellas, stories, essays, and memoirs by James, Cather, and Baldwin, plus Stein's portraits, geographical histories, lectures, plays, operas and autobiographies. We will also examine key biographical, critical and theoretical studies. The histories of readers' responses to and current uses of James, Stein, Cather and Baldwin offer an excellent introduction to the cultural construction of "the modern" through lesbian/gay/queer subjects over the past century. Gender and cross-gender affiliations, class, race and ethnic differences were all urgent questions for these four. James's, Stein's, Cather's and Baldwin's lives and works challenge many post-modern assumptions about what it meant--and what it might mean--to be a queer American. Conference projects may include historical and political as well as literary studies, focussing on any period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.