Epithet, theoretical analytic, identity, mode of being, sense of time, spatial coding, aesthetic, scholarly field. In recent US history the term queer has taken on many and varied meanings and this course looks to introduce new scholars to the emerged and emerging field through key terms and themes. Students will get a taste of the wide range of approaches, objects, forms, and styles that make up the field. The course begins with canonical essays, manifestos, and poetry and moves to contemporary work from queer scholars, activists, and artists to explore key tensions like those between Judith Butler’s “Critically Queer” and E Patrick Johnson’s “Quare Theory.” Alongside these readings, the course looks to both canonical and recent queer film as common site to work through the ideas and arguments presented in the readings.

Some primary and secondary sources include:

“The Combahee River Collective Statement,” Combahee River Collective
“The First Water is the Body,” Natalie Diaz
A View from the Bottom, Nguyen Tan Hoang
Moonlight, Barry Jenkins
“Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/ Disabled Existence,” Robert McRuer
“Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde
desierto desierto, Joey Enríquez
The Way He Looks, Daniel Ribeiro

Some semesters the course includes a class run instagram account.

The end of the Mexican American War and the Civil War marked major milestones in what would become the United States of America as we know today. This course offers a survey of American Literature from the end of these wars to our present moment with particular attention to major literary movements such as naturalism, realism, and modernism and the larger historical backdrop of queer liberation, the Harlem Rennaisance, and the Chicano movement.

In order to answer the question “what is American literature?” we first need to ask what or who is America. Canonically, surveys of American literature begin with Whitman or Twain and move to Upton Sinclair and F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner to Allen Ginsberg and Kurt Vonnegut. But what does it even mean to form a canon? What purposes do canons serve us as students of literature? Who creates, maintains, and comprises the canon? What would it mean to answer the question differently, pointedly so? This course offers the beginnings of that answer; or, it may offers chance to wonder whether the question is the right one to start with.

Some primary and secondary sources include:
“Democratic Vistas,” Walt Whitman
“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison
”The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective,” Linda Kerber
Who Would Have Thought It?, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
Cane, Jean Toomer
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez
Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
Postcolonial Love Poems, Natalie Diaz

In her 1992 work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison changes the course of literary studies by exposing the African presence in Western literature for what it is, the white imagination at work. The 2019 documentary about Toni Morrison and her work, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, features a plethora of art and one piece that extends the thinking of Playing in the Dark is Titus Kaphar’s Behind the Myth of Benevolence. In Behind the Myth and in Enough About You Kaphar takes portraiture and reimagines it. He disarms the white gaze and centers the Africanist presence in art. Morrison and Kaphar see the consequences of how the world is imagined and seek to challenge and change it all.

If we see an activist, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a person engaged in or advocating vigorous political activity,” then we should ask how they imagine the world differently. What is it that they are vigorously advocating for? And who are these activists? In this course we will traverse film, poetry, critical theory, documentary, memoir, fine art, and more to see how a range of thinkers imagine this world otherwise. We open with an accounting of what this world is that activists are attempting to change broken into Political, Economic, and Social imaginations that are central to how we arrived at where we are today. Though, these accountings themselves are made possible because of activists who changed the world. From there we will spend two weeks on four different kinds of minoritzed imaginations: Black, Brown, Crip, and Queer.

Some primary and secondary sources include:
Walkout, Dir. Edward James Olmos
Judas And The Black Messiah, Dir. Shaka King
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, Dir James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham
Paris is Burning, Dir. Jennie Livingston
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
Declaration of Independence, Representatives of the united States of America
“An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant
On Property, Rinaldo Walcott
“La Prieta,” Gloria E. Anzaldúa

This course aims to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Feminist Disability Studies through autobiographies, contemporary writings in the field, and short essays from a variety of Keyword books from NYU Press. The main objective of the course is to offer students the opportunity to learn and enhance critical approaches to the world around them while gaining a better understanding and proficiency in feminist studies, disability studies, critical race studies, and queer theory. In reading theoretical texts alongside a wide range of primary sources students will be able to better understand and engage with current debates within the field of Feminist Disability Studies. The class interrogates the way patriarchy and ableism come together to impact the lived experiences of disabled women and the ways disabled women build lives despite it. Central to the course are ideas of interdependence, bodily autonomy, and a feminist disability studies ethics of care.

Some primary and secondary sources include:
Life in the Sick-Room, Harriet Martineau
Sight Unseen, Georgina Kleege
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
Race Keyword, Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective
“The Only Thing You Have to Do Is Live,” S. Naomi Finkelstein
“Towards a Feminist Theory of Disability,” Susan Wendell
“Feminist Disability Studies” Rosemarie Garland Thomson

This course considers the theoretical influences/critical thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality. In particular it takes up novel methods found in and around the field of queer theory to offer students scaffolding from which to build their own approach to queerness and queer studies. It maps a trajectory from feminist and feminist of color critiques to current queer theoretical approaches, assuming the term queer as both a destabilizer of identities as well as a contemporary framework for thinking critically about gender and desire. The course moves beyond content to explore how queer thinking gets done.

The methods include:
Ephemera and Feeling
Intersectionality
(auto)Historia and Gesture
Critical Fabulation
Crip/Queer Intertextuality

Some primary and secondary sources include:
“Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” José Esteban Muñoz
How to Survive a Plague, David France
Black Feminism Reimagined, Jennifer Christine Nash
Pariah, Dee Rees
“Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance,” José Esteban Muñoz
“Gesture in Mambo Time,” Juana María Rodríguez
“Venus in Two Acts” Saidiya Hartman
The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye
“Disabling Sex: Notes for a Crip Theory of Sexuality” Robert McRuer

“Disability studies” describes a diverse array of projects, located primarily in the humanities but speaking to and with the social sciences, that challenge the ways in which “normalcy” and “abnormalcy” have been deployed to conceptualize physical and mental difference. Speaking back to medical models of disability that would position people with disabilities as only objects of knowledge, disability studies considers not only how disability functions symbolically in culture but also how people with disabilities have themselves been shapers of culture.

This course offers a survey of psychiatric disability with a focus on mania and depression with histories of madness and sanity serving as a larger backdrop that informs our current moment. We will examine a wide variety of texts in order to pose a series of overlapping questions: what languages does our culture provide us for thinking about disability and how have those languages shifted over time? How does psychiatric disability complicate the seeming divide between the medical and social modes of disability? How gender, sexuality, and race complicate both representations and the lived experience of those with psychiatric disability? How have discourses of sympathy, compensation, and accommodation been deployed to constrain or empower people with disabilities? How do people experiencing mania and depression talk back to systems of power and offer different understandings of the world? How does disability studies challenge our current sense of what it means to live in a multicultural society?

Some primary and secondary sources include:
Bipolar Expedition, Emily Martin
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfeild Jamison
The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang
A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan
“Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” Robert McRuer
Mad at School, Margaret Price
“A Mad Fight,” Bradley Lewis
“Mad Is a Place; or, the Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools,” La Marr Jurelle Bruce
”Brain Fog: The Race for Cripistemology,” Mel Y. Chen

In addition to regular semester long courses I have experience designing and teaching five-week 1 credit colloquiums that offer students a taste of a more narrowly defined topic within the fields of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Studies. The information for the most recent of these is listed below.

HIV/AIDS, Culture, and the Body
This course attends to the cultural representation of HIV/AIDS through film and visual culture to explore how the body, notions of health, and fear of infection impacted the medical and political trajectory of the country. Students engage with archival footage of ACT UP protests, documentary films, public health campaigns, and speeches from the U.S. Congress to gain a greater understanding of how disability and the body become entangled with nearly every facet of public life. With the current COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop, the course aims to offer students a glimpse into a community's fight for a just and caring world.

Course materials:
How to Survive a Plague, David France
Tongues Untied, Marlong Riggs
120 Beats per Minute, Robin Campillo
Untitled"(March 5th) #2, Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Untitled (Perfect Lovers), Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Portraits of People with AIDS” Douglas Crimp
“The Spectacle of Mourning,” Douglas Crimp
“Moving Pictures: AIDS on Film and Video,” Paul Sendziuk, Roger Hallas, Jim Hubbard. and Debra Levine
“Embodiment,” Abby Wilkerson in Keywords for Disability Studies
“Body,” Eva Cherniavsky in Keywords for American Cultural Studies