SUMMER SESSION

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GNDR_ST 390-0 : Toxic Homoeroticism

Description

Bad feminists, toxic homoerotic besties, girls and their girlfriends (whatever that means). How do we understand the contours of women’s relationships with other women? 

This course investigates representations of vexed intimacies between women in Anglo-American novels, short stories, and films. With these texts, we'll pose variety of questions about figurations of women and their desires for and from one another. When does a friendship go sour or get sexy? How do women (fail to) support other women? In what ways can we distinguish between anti-heroines and protagonists who simply don’t do what we want them to do? We'll examine how heteropatriarchy, whiteness, constructions of gender, and the marriage plot continue to shape Anglo-American women’s lives, plots, and communities. We'll also be challenged to explore how our expectations for, or ideas about, queer identity and feminist empowerment might disfigure or distort feelings women have for one another.

Supplementary essays by prominent black feminists and queer theorists will expose students to methods for reading texts through, around, and beyond our hegemonic understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and how they intertwine. Primary texts will include Jane Austern’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (2019), with secondary texts from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Williams and possible additions from Karyn Kusama, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, and Jenny Zhang.