"Sex is . . . an inherent twist or stumbling block, of reality." - Alenka Zupančič

A COURSE DESCRIPTION AND SCHEDULE WILL BE POSTED TO BBLEARN NO LATER THAN 4:30 PM WEDNESDAY JAN. 15--THE FIRST CLASS MEETING IS THURSDAY JAN. 16

Stephan Flores Spring 2020
ENGL 400 (s) Seminar: Gender & Sexuality—History, Theory, Literature, Film
2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. TR TLC 223
Prereq: Engl 102, one 200-level Engl Survey; English majors also need to have completed or be enrolled in Engl 215; other students, such as students pursuing the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor, by permission of the instructor.

Course description: It is difficult—is it impossible?—to think, be, feel, be affected by our identities within or beyond notions or categories of sex, sexualities, gender(s), desires and needs—these distinctions and how they have come to be different(ly experienced/conceived/represented) in different times and settings form the subject of our studies for this course. We’ll range across an eclectic selection of different genres—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, and film—and (think with) different theoretical perspectives to frame our inquiry. Scholar Valerie Traub asks, “Is sex good to think with? . . . Sexual knowledge is difficult because sex, as a category of human thought, volition, behavior, and representation, is for a variety of reasons, opaque, often inscrutable, and resistant to understanding.” In her book Queer Post-Gender Ethics, Lucy Nicholas argues that society needs to leave behind categories of gender. Others claim that we need to retain and to claim categories of gender(s) and different sexualities—that these identifications are vital to our social and expressive lives and relations. As Steven Kruger notes, however, while motivated by questions about identity, queer theory typically is “openly skeptical” about identity, that is, whether such categories as hetero- and homosexual are in some essential way fixed oppositions. Each of us will work to create an understanding of such possibilities and commitments. Put differently, how are we to live with ourselves—to live with others?

Written work include 14 (weekly) concise responses to our reading (minimum 225 words each) and to a peer's post (minimum 100 words each), a critical-reflective essay (six pages for body of essay) on what you are learning and thinking about gender and sexuality in relation to your aims, course outcomes, and as illustrated via analysis of one or more texts from our reading/resources, and a longer Term Analytic-Interpretive or Lyric Essay (8-10 pages) on topics of your choice in the contexts of our studies and readings.

Four Primary Required Texts:

Fleischmann, T. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through: An Essay (Coffee House Press, 2019) ISBN: 978-1-56689-547-7 or seek digital edition, including via UI VandalStore

[“How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? . . . Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.

Evaristo, Bernardine. Girl, Woman, Other. (Hamish Hamilton, 2019, ISBN-13: 978-0802156983) also in hardback, or seek digital edition, including via UI VandalStore

co-winner of the Booker Prize for the best novel written in English published in the UK or Ireland) [“Welcome to Newcastle, 1905. Ten-year-old Grace is an orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Cornwall, 1953. Winsome is a young bride, recently arrived from Barbados, realising the man she married might be a fool. London, 1980. Amma is the fierce queen of her squatters' palace, ready to Smash The Patriarchy with a new kind of feminist theatre. Oxford, 2008. Carole is rejecting her cultural background (Nigeria by way of Peckham) to blend in at her posh university. Northumberland, 2017. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is visiting Hattie who's in her nineties, who used to be young and strong, who fights to remain independent, and who still misses Slim every day. Welcome to Britain and twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly black - who call it home. Teeming with life and crackling with energy, Girl, Woman, Other follows them across the miles and down the years. With vivid originality, irrepressible wit and sly wisdom, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Vintage Classics, 2016ISBN-13: 978-1784870867) or see HBC/Mariner Books edition  ISBN 9780156628709 including via UI VandalStore

—listed at #50 in The Guardian’s list of the 100 Best Novels) [“In the spring of 1924, Virginia Woolf, then in her 40s, gave a famous lecture, later published as the essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, in which she declared that "we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature". She might have been speaking about herself. In the next 15-odd years, before her suicide, Woolf would transform the English literary landscape forever. She would innovate (To the Lighthouse); she would flirt (Orlando); she would provoke (A Room of One's Own) and, privately, would dazzle herself and her friends with a stream of letters (and diaries), all of which reveal a writer's mind at full tilt.
Woolf is one of the giants of this series [100 Best Novels], and Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel, is one of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers. Like Ulysses (no 46 in this series), it takes place in the course of a single day, probably 13 June 1923. Unlike Joyce's masterpiece, Woolf's female protagonist is an upper-class English woman living in Westminster who is planning a party for her husband, a mid-level Tory politician. As Clarissa Dalloway's day unfolds, in and around Mayfair, we discover that not only is she being treated in Harley Street for severe depression, a familiar subject to Woolf, but she also conceals a troubled past replete with unarticulated love and suggestions of lesbianism. Equally troubled is the novel's second main character, explicitly a "double", a Great War veteran who fought in France "to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays". Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell shock and is on his way to a consultation with Clarissa's psychiatrist. "What is this terror?" writes Woolf. "What is this ecstasy?"

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours (1998; Picador, 2000 [ISBN-13: 978-0312243029]

winner of the Pulitizer Prize for fiction) [also may consider the film version of this novel] “In The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage. Cunningham makes the two women’s lives converge with Virginia Woolf's during the party for Richard.

Also we'll read/discuss:

Delappe, Sarah. The Wolves (2016, listed at #22 in a recent New York Times’ theater critics’ list of the Best 25 American Plays Since Angels in America [1993]) “The teenage girls of “The Wolves” — the name of the play is also the name of their soccer team — are identified only by the number on their jersey. And they spend the entire show, which takes place on an AstroTurf field, in their uniforms. Yet instead of robbing the characters of their individuality, this setup achieves the exact opposite: It allows the audience to focus on each girl’s personality as it emerges — clearly, indelibly — over the course of the play. Sarah DeLappe makes us work a little harder, while underlining the balance of individualism and teamwork, effort and sacrifice that sustains both soccer and society at large.”

Todd Haynes’s film Carol (2015); other optional films, such as Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Lone Scherfig’s An Education (2009), Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), Albert Nobbs (2011), and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (2018).

Machado, Carmen Maria. “The Husband Stitch.” [short story]

Short fiction selections from Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories--two of the following four stories: "The Half-Skinned Steer"; "The Mud Below"; "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World"; "Brokeback Mountain" [also film version]

One or more stories by Alice Munro.

Possibly Henry James's story "The Beast in the Jungle." [paired with Sedgwick's essay on homosexual panic]

Some possibilities for our theoretical readings/studies/conversations—I will pare the list down to a manageable number of readings so that we are likely to read a theoretically focused essay frequently in coordination with the literary texts/films, and then provide selections from the rest as resources for additional readings and options for the summary assignment:

Warhol, Robyn. “Anglophone Feminisms.” Richter, David H., ed. A Companion to Literary Theory. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2018. 314-324.

Galvan, Margaret. “Gender Theory: Femininities and Masculinities.” Richter, David H., ed. A Companion to Literary Theory. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2018. 325-335.

Kruger, Steven. “Queer Theory.” Richter, David H., ed. A Companion to Literary Theory. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2018. 336-347.

Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second edition. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 900-911.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” (1985), 5pp.; Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), 12 pp.—excerpts from Robert Parker’s Critical Theory anthology (2012)
Perhaps another chapter/essay from Sedgwick.

Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1993, pp. 17–32.

Selection(s) from Traub, Valerie. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016.

Ahmed, Sara. Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 2010), pp. 571-594
Ahmed, Sara. "Happy Objects" (2010, from The Affect Theory Reader)
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2015 [chapter 7 on Queer Feelings (in PDF of chs. 6-7)]

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, identity Politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 6 (1991): 1241-1299.
Puar, Jasbir. “’I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Third Edition. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. 1000-1013.
Nash, Jennifer. “Re-Thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review, vol. 89, no. 89, 2008, pp. 1–15.
Nash, J.C., 2016. Feminist originalism: Intersectionality and the politics of reading. Feminist Theory, 17(1), pp.3–20.
Dietze, Gabriele, Elahe Haschemi Yekani, and Beatrice Michaelis. “Modes of being vs. categories: Queering the tools of intersectionality.” Beyond Gender: An Advanced Introduction to Futures of Feminist and Sexuality Studies. Eds. Greta Olson, Daniel Hartley, Mirjam Horn-Schott, and Leonie Schmidt. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Halberstam, Judith. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. 2635-2653.
Jeffrey Williams' interview "Queer 2.0: Judith 'Jack' Halberstam Complicates Gender" The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 1, 2012)

Weiner, Joshua J., and Damon Young. “Queer Bonds.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011, pp. 223–241.
Butler, Judith. “Remarks on “Queer Bonds”” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2011, pp. 381–387.

Heinz, Matthew [bettina]. Entering Transmasculinity: the inevitability of discourse. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2016. [preface and introduction]
Coffman, Chris. "Theorizing Transgender Embodiments." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 17 no. 2, 2011, pp. 423-425.

Rudy, Kathy. "Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory.” Feminist Studies 27.1 (Spring, 2001): 191-222.

Nicholas, Lucy. Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Introduction (1-16): Queer theory -- Sex/gender/sexuality/difference -- Approach -- The argument and structure: deconstructing sexual difference, reconstructing ethical selves; [17-29] The Resilience of Bigenderism -- The omnirelevance of sex/gender identity -- The 'disembodied' nature of sex/gender -- The binary limits of trans identity politics

Carroll, Rachel. Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. [Introduction, pp. 1-19]

Dicinoski, Michelle. “Wild Associations: Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson and the Lyric Essay.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, no. [Supplement 39], 2017, pp. 1–12.
Rendle-Short, Francesca. Michelle. “Essay (queer). The. Essay. Queer. And. All. That.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, no. [Supplement 39], 2017, pp. 1–12.

Selection(s) from Mari Ruti’s The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects (2017)

Potential selection(s) from:

Lanser, Susan S. “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 23-42.
Keen, Suzanne. “Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 123-146.

Coykendall, Abby. “Towards a Queer Feminism; Or, Feminist Theories and/as Queer Narrative Studies.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 327-333.

Claggett, Shalyn. “The Human Problem.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 353-360.

Matz, Jesse. “’No Future’ vs. ‘It Gets Better’.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2015. 227-250.

Selections from Gender, Sex, and Sexualities: Psychological Perspectives. Eds. Nancy K. Dess, Jeanne Marecek, and Leslie C. Bell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.