Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2019
Instructor: Paul Edwards
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:45 - 11:45
This course examines a range of texts from American authors, poets, musicians, and film directors that engage with queer and subversive themes and desires, various sexual identities, and other relations outside of the heterosexual nuclear family. Central to the course's investigation are the intersections between queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory.
The regulation of gender and sexual behavior—and transgression of sex/gender norms—have been central to American society from its beginnings. Weaving these analyses with our primary sources, this course focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. With help from social and cultural historians, we’ll pay close attention to how changing discourses shape the meaning of queerness in America, and how queer writers and artists have changed America.
Register for HL90DM on my.harvard.