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Schedule

Please read the assigned texts before class. This includes the first day’s reading. If you join the class late, catch up as quickly as you can.

We will often move backward and forward in time as we work through concepts and movements, which means you are responsible for attending to dates of publication and considering which ideas authors may or may not have had access to. Pay attention to other contexts too: academic discipline, activist commitment, authorial voice.

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 There is a lot of assigned reading for this class, and much (though not all) of it is dense and theoretical. Here are two articles on reading scholarship that you might find useful and interesting: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know,” which describes best practices for deep reading; and Melissa Boone Brown, “How to Read for Grad School,” which discusses how to cope with seemingly-unmanageable reading loads.

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Where readings are archived in spaces that require institutional access, links will take you directly to an authentication page where you can log in with your UMD ID. Installing this browser button may speed up your off-campus access. If you are using this syllabus for individual study and cannot access the texts, contact me (alothian at umd dot edu) and I will happily share files with you. If you are able to use institutional journal subscriptions, though, please do, as this helps authors to see that they are being read as well as supporting the work of journals publishing feminist and queer scholarship.


5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Week 1 8/30
Setting Intentions and Collective Worldmaking
Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, “Introduction” to Octavia’s Brood (OB) (2015)
Sara Ahmed, “Introduction” to Living a Feminist Life and as much of the rest as you like. (2017)

6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Introductory Reflection due: Monday 9/4 or the Monday after you join the class.


7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Unit 1: Foundational Critical Race Feminisms

8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Week 2 9/6 Theory as Praxis: Black Feminist Groundwork
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977)
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” (1981)
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” “Learning from the 1960s” (1984) (in Sister Outsider)
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989)
Jennifer Nash, “Intersectionality and its Discontents” (2017)
Grace Kyongwon Hong, “Neoliberal Disavowal and the Politics of the Impossible” from Death Beyond Disavowal (2015) Footnotes for Hong chapter.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Evidence” (OB); Walidah Imarisha, “Dark Angel” (OB)

9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Week 3 9/13 US Women of Color Feminism: Bridges and Networks
Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrié Moraga (ed), This Bridge Called My Back (1981; 2015). Read all the introductions and as much of the rest of the book as you can.
Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back” (2017)
AnaLouise Keating, “Beyond Intersectionality: Theorizing Interconnectivity With/In This Bridge Called My Back” from Transformation Now (2013)
Dani McClain, “Homing Instinct” (OB); Hiromi Goto, “Notes from Liminal Spaces” (2017)

10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 3 Week 4 9/21 Agency and Colonization
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1984)
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)
Saba Mahmood, “The Subject of Freedom” from Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005)
J. Jack Halberstam, “Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity” from The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
Bao Phi, “Revolution Shuffle” (OB); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Children Who Fly” (OB)

11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Week 5 9/27 Producing Knowledge in the Wake
Avery Gordon, “her shape and his hand” from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997)
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
Nisi Shawl, “Deep End” (2014); adrienne maree brown, “the river” (OB)

12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Saturday 9/30: attendance encouraged at Black Liberation: life, death, and queer resistance conference at Morgan State (Baltimore) with keynote by Christina Sharpe

13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Visionary Speculation due: Friday 9/29.


14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Unit 2: Identities/Politics/Sexualities/Genders

15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 1 Week 6 10/4 Gendering Subjectivities
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of ‘Sex‘” (1975); optional additional excerpt from the introduction to Deviations: a Gayle Rubin Reader where she talks about the essay’s origins and publication history.
Judith Butler, “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix” from Gender Trouble (1990) (1999 and 1990 Prefaces included in PDF as optional extras)
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987)

16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Week 7 10/11 Queering Critique
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984). Recommended: “Blood Under the Bridge: Reflections on Thinking Sex” (2010)
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public” (1998) [direct link if needed]
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now” (1994)
José Muñoz, “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism” and “Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories” from Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Week 8 10/18 Critiquing Queer
Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997)
Jasbir Puar, “Introduction: Homonationalism and Biopolitics” from Terrorist Assemblages (2007)
Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Introduction” from Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (2011)
Qwo-Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances Between Native and Queer Studies” from Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (2016)

18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Week 9 10/25 Trans Interventions
Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto” (1992)
Susan Stryker, “My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994) and “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” (2004)
C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife.” (2013)
micha cardenas, “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis” (2015); “Redshift and Portalmetal” (2015)

19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Contextual Exploration due: Friday 10/30


20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Unit 3: Doing Scholarship, Making Worlds

21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Week 10 11/1 Situating Knowledges
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privileging of Partial Perspective” (1988)
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses” (2004)
Moya Bailey, “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics” (2015)
Leanne Betasomosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories and Songs (2013)
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Shobies’ Story” (1990)

22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Preliminary Research Question due: Friday 11/3

23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Week 11 11/8 Queer Histories, Feminist Archives
Emily Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity on the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016)
Roxanne Samer, “Revising ‘Re-vision’: Documenting 1970s Feminisms and the Queer Potentiality of Digital Feminist Archives” (2014)

24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Week 12 11/15 The Erotics of Knowledge
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984 in Sister Outsider).
Juana Maria Rodriguez, “Latina Sexual Fantasies: The Remix” from Sexual Futures (2014)
LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (2015)

25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 November 17-20: National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference in Baltimore!
Attendance of at least two panels is strongly encouraged. We will work together to make sure everyone can get there.

26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Week 13 11/22 THANKSGIVING BREAK
On blog: post a reflection either on one of the panels you attended at NWSA or on another event you attend this semester.

27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Week 14 11/29 Disabling Scholarship
Alison Kafer, Introduction to Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013)
Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017)
Mia Mingus, “Hollow” (OB)

28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Week 15 12/6 Reflecting on Feminist Academic Life
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017)

29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Final Projects and Closing Reflections Due: Saturday December 16

Source: https://wmst601fa17.queergeektheory.org/syllabus/schedule/?replytopara=6