Fall 2022, Tuesdays, 3:00-6:00PM; Meets at MIT

The central aim of this discussion-based seminar is to examine the key debates, questions, and issues animating feminist and queer theories of the last century. More expansive than exhaustive, the course analyzes its titular theories through legal studies, performance studies, critical geography, area studies, and more. The texts that will inform our work are organized thematically to generate conversations across time and space, as well as between and beyond disciplines. Subtending this work will be the following questions, as they orbit around feminist and queer academic projects: what are the historical contexts and activist projects that have sparked and sustained queer and feminist theories? What are the stakes behind their solidification as fields of study—who and what has been left out, misread, misrepresented? What can feminist and queer theories do now, in a time when LGBT rights are mainstream, gender binaries have come undone, and “love is love”? This seminar will also develop the soft skills of synthetic and analytical writing, reflexive goal making and achieving, writing for a specific audience, and providing and receiving constructive feedback.

Faculty

Tommy Conners is lecturer in History & Literature at Harvard University. He works in the fields of affect, queer, and critical race theories and legal, US Latinx, and Latin American Studies.