This course takes students to the cutting edge of queer and feminist theory and performance studies. We engage with four scholarly methods, embraced by performance studies, that provide insight into racialized and gendered structures of feeling; queer transnational social histories; technosexuality and mutation; and minor keys of Black unruliness and fugitivity.  Our strategy is to move between consideration of four key new critical texts and an archive of contemporary performances. By doing so we explore how a performance studies approach might prompt, illuminate and breathe life into concepts in queer and feminist studies. And, we will also ask how feminist and queer theory are fundamental to the ongoing concerns of performance studies. Our goal is to form an interpretive community to wrestle with four texts that are utterly current—texts whose meanings and implications have not yet been sedimented through repeated acts of reading. Thus, we join with reading communities near and far that are also grappling with these recent texts; and we participate in the global project of theorizing queerness, feminism, and performance.

More info: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/84048