To Be Queer, Black, & Beautiful: The Transgressive Black Body in Black Diasporic Literature

To Be Queer, Black, & Beautiful: The Transgressive Black Body in Black Diasporic Literature is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies course taught by Jeannette Lee.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
This is an advanced introductory literature class that examines African-American, Caribbean, and Black British literature through the framework of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation. We will read novels, poetry, and plays to analyze how black disaporic writers portray the intersection of these identity categories. Selected readings will demonstrate the range of imagined possibilities as well as critiques and the shoring-up of limiting notions of sexual identity. Our intervention will necessarily consider the black body as a contested site through which the meaning of gender and sexuality has been disputed. This approach considers how gender and sexuality are constructed and what types of persons are privileged and de-privileged as well as the choices that are made available and legitimate for black characters. We will read literature by black lesbian, gay, and bi-sexual authors as well as writing that portrays black LGBT characters. In this focus, this class will examine the depiction of same-sex intimacy as well as address the critique launched through sexuality and sexual orientation of essentialist constructions of black communities and ?authentic? blackness. Some of the questions we will consider: What are gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation? How do gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation intersect with and refract each other as well as race, color, class? How are gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered, and heterosexual bodies scripted? What types of bodies and persons are legitimated and why? What does it mean to have a sexual identity? What structures of feeling can be read through sexuality? And who is black? These queries will be addressed through the literature as well as theoretical and literary critical readings from Black Feminist Criticism, Feminist Theory, Masculinity Studies, and Queer Theory. Students will also be assigned recommended readings that provide an understanding of the specific historical contexts and cultural trajectories within which the literature is situated. Writing by Audre Lorde, Hilton Als, Thomas Glave, Jewelle Gomez, Samuel Delaney, Dionne Brand, R. Erica Doyle, and Michelle Cliff and others will be assigned.

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing