WGSS 29902 - Seeing Through Gender & Sexuality

Course Credit: 1
SEEING THROUGH GENDER & SEXUALITY: This course investigates artists, art objects, and visual culture more broadly that perpetuate, contest, and undermine the roles gender and sexuality play in images. How do images produce feminist, queer, or transgender formations, and how might such gazes incite another way of seeing; in other words, how do images help us see differently? How is this visual logic in conversation with and modified by postcolonial, decolonial, and critical race theories? Through formal analysis and in-depth discussion of readings by key thinkers in this interdisciplinary field, this course explores, historical, political, and social developments around sexuality, gender, desire, social change, self-expression, the body, and hetero/homo/cisnormativity. This course does not adhere to a particular chronology but instead approaches the material thematically. Overall, this course draws on contemporary examples (1980s onwards) and some historical sources to shed light on transnational approaches to queer, feminist, and transgender perspectives and aesthetics. Select artists: ACT-UP, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lola Flash, Felix-Gonzalez Torres, Nan Goldin, Yayoi Kusama, Laura Aguilar, Lyle Ashton Harris, Catherine Opie, De LaGrace Volcano, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Kent Monkman, Richard Fung, JJ Levine, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Tina Takemoto, Nao Bustamante, Renee Cox, Nina Arsenault, Xandra Ibarra, Sunil Gupta, Tejal Shah, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani Kayode, Zanele Muholi, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Chitra Ganesh, AB Soto, ETC Content warning: Given the subject matter of the course, at times we will be looking at sexually explicit material and graphic visuals. We will be discussing topics like racism, colonialism, gender and sexual violence, BDSM, AIDS/HIV, suicide, mental illness, grief, etc.