This course will provide you with an introduction to queer studies: an interdisciplinary field that critically examines and challenges normative and binary understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as hierarchies, social inequalities, and discrimination linked to sexuality and gender identity and expression.
The course focuses on the genealogy of queer studies; on queer theory, as a critical lens that examines concepts of sexuality and gender as social and cultural phenomena structured and represented through binaries, categories, and language; and on state-of-the-art developments in the field, such as queer ecologies, queer death studies, and queer aesthetics. You will learn how to apply queer methodologies to LGBTQIA+ questions and to the problematics that extend beyond traditionally understood frames of intersectional gender, sex, and sexuality.
The course will equip you with key concepts, analytical tools, and critical skills necessary for a better understanding and assessment of contemporary discourses and representation of gender and sexuality – in their enmeshment with processes of racialisation, class, and disability, among others – in cultural debates and expressions, society, art, and the media.