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Queer Studies Links
Queer Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field whose goal is to analyze antinormative sexual identities, performances, discourses and representations in order ultimately to destabilize the notion of normative sexuality and gender. Queer studies comes out of a critique of identity politics. It rejects essentialized conceptualization[s] of sexuality, gender, and sexual identity as innate or fixed. It represents a deconstruction of hegemonic conceptions of sexual and gender categories within straight, gay and lesbian communities. In queer studies, the interpretation, enactment, and destabilizing of sexual identities is linked to that of gender categories. The queer studies concentration's home in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender makes explicit these links between theories of gender and sexuality.
In the queer studies concentration students are encouraged to consider the historical and theoretical foundations of queer studies as well as the potential consequences (epistemological and political) of a queer studies critique. This might include attention to the connections between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies, feminist studies and queer studies and the implications of a queer studies critique for other disciplines.
Possible areas of focus include: the history of sexuality, social movements, politics, anthropology, literature, theater, art, film, science and sexology, public policy, law, ethnic studies, music, demography, geography, media analysis, philosophy, etc.
Courses in the Queer Studies Concentration (check Smith College catalog to determine if course if offered this academic year)
SWG 100 Issues in Queer Studies (2 and 4 credit)
SWG 200 Queer Theories/Queer Cultures (formerly Introduction to Queer Studies)
SWG 205 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in the United States, 1945-2003
SWG 220 Queer Theories: Borders, Limits, and Margins
SWG 260 The Cultural Work of Memoir
WST 290 Queer Looks: Gender, Sexuality and Film
SWG 300 Special Topics in the Study of Women and Gender: The Politics of Sexual Representation
SWG 310 Queer Globalizations, Local Homosexualities: Transnational Formations
SWG 315 Sexual Histories, Lesbian Stories (former special topic in WST 300)
SWG 312 Queer Resistances: Identities, Communities, and Social Movements
AAS 366 Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Readings in Black and Queer
AAS 366 Contemporary Topics in Afro-American Studies: Black Gay Intellectuals: James Baldwin, Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill
ARH 260 Art Historical Studies: Representing Queerness in 20th-Century American Art
GOV 269 Politics of Gender and Sexuality
GOV 367 Seminar in Political Theory: Queer Theory
REL 277 South Asian Masculinities