DET101-Gender Studies and Queer Theory (1970s-present)

Sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture.

Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminst cricism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan).

1. What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful) and feminie (passive, margianlized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?

2. What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question the masculine/ feminine binary? What happens to those elements/ characters?

3. What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived masculine/ feminie binary? In

4. How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure and forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative?

5. What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay, lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed in... the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?

6. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?

7. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian experience and history, including iterary history?

8. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically, psychologically) homophobic?

9. How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that are by writers who are apparently homosexual?

10. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?