Queer Entanglements

Queer questions have been in the air for over a
generation, beginning with resistance to binaries
of male and female or gay and lesbian, and
extending to anyone who refuses heteronormativity.
As an embrace of the vital position of the
outsider, queer refers to "the open mesh of
possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and
resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when
the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of
anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made)
to signify monolithically." (Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick).

This course combines a set of readings in queer
texts with a workshop attentive to the genre
distinctions of fiction, non-fiction, documentary,
auto-fiction, and poetic practice. It demands if
the queer position necessitates a queer modality,
a newly evolving language. It posits queerness as
a hybrid status, intersectional, always re-made by
every generation, with a problematic relationship
to existing forms, to narrative, criticality, the
poetic figure, and the demands of closure. It asks
if every new queer moment requires a
re-examination of form. Among class readings are
memoir, fiction, self-documentation, auto-fiction,
trans-texts, science fiction, and theoretical
screeds.

Authors may include Paul Preciado, Roland Barthes,
Samuel Delany, Kevin Killian, Lauren Berlant,
Gloria Anzaldua, Jean Genet, Audre Lorde, William
Burroughs, Juliet Jacques, Andrea Lawlor, Jose
Esteban Munoz, Monique Wittig, Jack Halberstam, or
Kathy Acker. The readings will be tailored to the
class's participants, who will also workshop one
text of their own, a new or developing work, short
or chapters of a longer practice, and of variable
or evolving queer form. According to Jose Esteban
Munoz, "Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an
ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer,
but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a
horizon imbued with potentiality.. The future is
queerness's domain."