Autumn 2019:
From the Harem to Helem: Gender and Sexuality in the Modern Middle East - Taught by Ghenwa Hayek
This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East. First, we will outline the colonial legacies of gender politics and gendered discourses in modern Middle Eastern history. We will discuss orientalist constructions of the harem and the veil (Allouche, Laila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Loghod), and their contested afterlives across the Middle East. We will also explore colonial (homo)sexuality, and attendant critiques (Najmabadi, Massad). We will pay especial attention to local discourses about gender and sexuality, and trouble facile assumptions of “writing back” while attending to the various specificities of local discourses of everyday life across various sites of the Middle East. Eschewing reductive traps for more nuanced explorations of the specifics of life in Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul, or Tehran – as well as to rural areas – we will show how gender and sexuality are constructed and practiced in these locales. In addition to foundational scholarly texts in the field, we will also engage with an array of cultural texts (films, novels, poetry, comics) and – where possible – have conversations with feminist and gay rights activists who are working in these sites via Skype/teleconferencing, such as founding members of Lebanese NGOs such as Nasawiya and Helem.
Winter 2020:
On "Women's Writing" - taught by Sophie Salvo
This course interrogates “women’s writing” as a historical, theoretical, and literary category. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has used the category “women’s writing” to recuperate texts by historically marginalized female authors. This practice has led to a reconsideration of the role of gender in literary production, authorship, and canon formation. Focusing on the context of modern Europe, and the genre of narrative prose, this course aims to reevaluate the classification “women’s writing.” Is “women’s writing,” to borrow a phrase from Joan Scott, a “useful category of analysis” in the 21st century? Can it help us account for how gendered subjects have been constructed through narrative? To what extent do traditional generic and disciplinary divisions limit our understanding of women’s texts? Does the concept “women’s writing” allow for intersectional approaches to the study of gender and sexuality? Course readings will include literary texts from the 18th-21st centuries (works by Jane Austen, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Elfriede Jelinek, and Marjane Satrapi, among others), as well as theoretical approaches from feminist, queer, and transgender studies.
Medieval Masculinity - taught by Jonathon Lyon
This course will introduce students to concepts of masculinity in the Middle Ages, especially in the period between approximately 1000 and 1500 CE. Special attention will be paid to medieval notions of honor and to the roles that knighthood, chivalry, and monasticism played in promoting (often contradictory) masculine ideals. The course has two main goals. First, to assess and discuss recent scholarly debates and arguments about medieval masculinity. Second, to read closely a variety of medieval sources—including Arthurian literature, chronicles of the Crusades, biographical texts, and monastic histories—in order to develop new perspectives on masculinity during the Middle Ages.
Spring 2020:
Trans Bodies in Horror Cinema - taught by Malynne Sternstein
Films presenting trans bodies or “psyches” have historically often othered these as "monstrous," and compelled a sense of the inevitable tragedy of living in sexual fluidity. To fully contemplate such expressions of horror, tragedy, or pity, the course will screen and discuss films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980), Sleepaway Camp (Robert Hiltzick, 1983), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almadovar, 2011), Predestination (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014) but also considers films of the trans body made ostensibly more calculable, at least in terms of moral and ethical stability, such as Robocop, the Alien films of Ridley Scott, Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017), and the online choice map game Detroit Become Human. The course is dedicated foremost to rupturing binary thinking (as a form of nonage) and the critical theory that will ballast our readings includes selections from Haraway, Halberstam, Garber, Benschoff, Reese’s The Fourth Age, Schelde’s Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters, and Foucault’s Abnormal.
As skin is arguably the most important material of the trans body—excessive skin, deficient skin, marked and unmarked skin, skin that can be covered, unveiled, recovered, the course will read skin as both a thetic and categorical dilemma, but also as method. To this end, the overarching thinking important to the course, and one we will dip into anarchically here and there, intentionally and by chance: Delueze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.