Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces students to current debates on gender identity and gender difference from the perspectives of queer subjects. Explores recent theoretical and cultural works on gender from queer, transgender, and feminist perspectives, while examining the challenges they pose to current understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, and the body.

COURSE DETAILS:

We live in a world that is increasingly attentive to the ways in which our gender identities and practices might fall outside of patriarchal and heteronormative social norms. Yet, rather than simply conceptualising “queer genders” as self-evident categories, we should also ask: Where do queer and normative genders come from? Queer to whom? Normative to whom? Would my queer gender identity be considered quite normal in another culture, another region, and/or in another historical period? And perhaps your society’s normative gender would be considered queer in mine? Can historical figures be trans? How would we know?

In this course, we will attempt to address these questions by examining a wide range of non-normative gendered subjectivities. We will consider examples from both the contemporary and premodern eras, from across the Anglophone and the Asia Pacific. We will reflect on how queer subjectivities challenge conventional definitions of “gender” and “sexuality”, think about how they are represented and conceptualised on screen media culture, and analyse the ways in which gender categories are shaped by colonial, medical and globalising discourses.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

For more detailed information please see the GSWS website: http://www.sfu.ca/gsws/undergraduate/courses/Educational_Goals.html

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: