Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

We examine how racial and sexual norms and expectations converge in everyday ways and places. Centring critiques queer theory and politics by Indigenous queer, Two-Spirit and feminist, Black, and queer of colour scholars, we ask how racial and sexual logics come together in the spaces we interact with daily. Students who have taken GSWS 411 under the title "The Everyday and Everywhere of Race and Sexuality" may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

The course introduces recent work that focuses on how sexualities and race operate at different times and places. In this discussion-based seminar, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the everyday workings of race and sexuality in connection to dominant power relations in the colonial and capitalist present.

This discussion-based seminar examines how racial and sexual norms, expectations, and logics converge in everyday ways and places. We will focus on how racial and sexual logics come together in the spaces we interact with daily (i.e. home, school, work), to the broader places that impact our lives (i.e. the nation). By centering current critiques of queer theory and politics by Indigenous queer, Two-Spirit and feminist, Black, and queer of colour scholars, the course investigates how hetero- and homo- normativity are contoured by processes and practices of racialization.

Through seminar discussions, guest lectures, readings, research projects, and assignments, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the everyday ways that race and sexuality are connected to dominant power relations in, to paraphrase queer of colour theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz (2009), the stifling colonial and capitalist present.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

In taking this course, students will:

• Develop a nuanced understanding of how sexuality and race are co-constituted.
• Articulate how the temporalities and spaces are sexualized and racialized.
• Be able to apply concepts from queer theory and critical race studies to ongoing crises of social injustice as well as to their own lives, histories and relations.
• Gain conceptual and analytical tools to engage in research on race and queer topics.

For more detailed information please see the GSWS website: https://www.sfu.ca/gsws/undergraduate/courses/goals

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Readings, including book chapters, journal articles and other materials, will be available on Canvas and/or via SFU library databases.

REQUIRED READING NOTES: