Tuesdays 2:00 - 4:00 PM

May 4, 2021 - June 1, 2021

Application Deadline: April 15, 2021

This micro-seminar explores queerness in romantic comedy and comedic dimensions of queer theory. As a meet cute between romcom and queer theory, our investigation will play with ideas of laughter, desire, and identity. The crucial idea is that, despite romcom’s powerful ideological machinery for fashioning genders, sexualities, and marriages, it exposes the fragile limits of normativity. We’ll identify romcom’s queer capacities with several questions: how has romcom been a useful genre for imagining queerness and assessing feminism? How do compelling romcoms play with other aspects of identity, including ethnic, religious, racial, and class identities, as a part of their explorations of romance? How have romcom’s aesthetic strategies and sensuous effects—especially its distinctive techniques for representing desirable faces, bodies, and voices—been used to articulate queerness? How do romcoms use comedy to stage the politics of desire across public, private, and counter-public spheres? Our films and readings will focus on queer romcom as an imaginative political and philosophical discourse. Our collaborative, creative work will be in playing with possible romcom plots and characters.

Faculty

Dr. David Sherman is faculty in the English Department at Brandeis University and co-organizer of the Brandeis Justice Initiative. He teaches courses on comedy, public sphere theory, the politics of elegy and commemoration, literature in the criminal justice system, and storytelling performance. His academic research focuses on modern literature as a secular world-making project, the contemporary mortuary imagination, and the philosophical stakes of comedy.