Module convenor - Dr Ross G. Forman
r.g.forman@warwick.ac.uk

Module Tutor:
Evan Hayles Gledhill
Evan.Gledhill@warwick.ac.uk

Module aims: This module aims to familiarise students with a range of literature by LGBTQ+ writers, filmmakers, and artists, largely from the Anglophone world. Through critical and theoretical readings, you will learn about the history of queer representation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Among the topics we will cover are (which vary from year to year): the reclaiming of the trans, nonbinary, gay and lesbian past; the effect of obscenity trials on queer expression; narrating the AIDS crisis; homosociality; queer reading practices; the development of the LGBTQIA+ canon; intersectionality (with critical methodologies surrounding race, gender, imperialism, and historical and anthropological approaches); and remediation. We will also look at debates around introducing queer identities to children through literary texts. A particular focus will be on fiction and the novel as forms that have a particular (though not necessarily privileged) relationship to questions of queer interiority and the narration of same-sex acts and identities.

The module complements the 15-CATS module “EN372: Queer and There: Queer Theory and the History of Sexuality in the Global Context,” but there is no prerequisite.

Note that most secondary readings will be available via Talis AspireLink opens in a new window, the Library's course extract system.

Required Reading:

Ismat Chughtai, "The Quilt" (1942). CLICK HERE for the link to this short story online.Link opens in a new window

Required viewing:
Mädchen in Uniform (1931)

Available at Mädchen in UniformLink opens in a new window. (Do not watch the 1958 version!) [Copies of the DVD are also in the library.]

Required Critical Reading:

Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan, "Defining Queer Theory" in Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (London: Springer Nature Limited, 2020) 1-21.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Axiomatic," Epistemology of the Closet

Recommended Critical Reading:
Annamarie Jagose, "Introduction," Queer Theory

Required Reading:

Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox.*

*This is a long novel, so please try to read it before term starts.

Required Critical Reading:

Lisa Hager, "A Case for a Trans Studies Turn in Victorian Studies: 'Female Husbands' of the Nineteenth Century," Victorian Review 44.1.

Rahul Rao, "The Infeffable Somethingness of Love and Revolution," Jindal Law and Humanities Review 1 (2020): 108-12.

Recommended Critical Reading:

"Jack Sheppard" in The Newgate Calendar (online)

Jordy Rosenberg, "Trans/War Boy/Gender: The Primitive Accumulation of T," https://salvage.zone/in-print/trans-war-boy-gender/

Required Reading:
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

Required Critical Reading:
Mandy Koolen, "Historical Fiction and the Revaluing of Historical Continuity in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet," Contemporary Literature 51.2 (2010): 371-397.

Recommended Critical Reading:

Naoise Murphy, "Queering History with Sarah Waters: Tipping the Velvet, Lesbian Erotic Reading and the Queer Historical Novel," Journal of Women's of International Women's Studies 22.2 (2020): 7-18.

Required Reading:

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [Some parts may be skimmed.]

[Note: What parts speak most to us as individual readers will vary from person to person, and I encourage you to make your own judgments about where best to skim. Part of this exercise is to help you to develop independent reading practices as you progress through your degree course.]

Required Critical Reading:
Laura Doan, "The Mythic Moral Panic: Radclyffe Hall and the New Geneology" in Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture 1-30 and notes

Jay Prosser, "'Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition': The Invert, The Well of Loneliness and the Narrative Origins of Transsexuality" in Second Skins: 135-169 and notes 248-253.

Recommended Critical Reading:

Katherine A. Costello, "A No-Man's Land of Sex: Reading Stephen Gordon and 'Her' Critics," Journal of Lesbian Studies 22.2 (2018): 165-184.

Heather Love, "Unwanted Being: Stephen Gordon's Spoiled Identity" in Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.

Required Reading:

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt [Carol].

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal (extract)

starting page 8 in this linked edition ("I give the name violence to a boldness") to page 32 ("...where I shall never go").Link opens in a new window

Required Critical Reading:

Jenny M. James, "Maternal Failures, Queer Futures: Reading The Price of Salt (1952) and Carol (2015) against Their Grain," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 24.2 (2018): 291-314.

RESPONSE ESSAYS DUE (Non-finalists)

READING WEEK

Required Reading:
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

Required Critical Reading:
Kevin Mumford, "Losing the March" in Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis 11-38 and notes 202-206.

Recommended Critical Reading:
Colm Toibin, "James Baldwin: The Flesh and the Devil" in Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Life and Literature 185-214Link opens in a new window

Matt Brim, "Paradoxical Reading Practices: Giovanni's Room as Queer/Gay/Trans/Novel" in James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination 55-91.

Required Viewing and Reading:
Basil Dearden, Victim [Available from the Library via the Box of Broadcasts database.]

Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (extract, pages 163-185)  Link opens in a new window

Required Critical Reading:
Matt Houlbrook, "Daring to Speak Whose Name? Queer Cultural Politics" in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 241-263

Recommended Critical Reading:
Richard Dyer, "Victim: Hegemonic Project" in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation, 71-88

Required Reading:

Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement

Required Critical Reading:
Kate Houlden, "Andrew Salkey, the British Home, and the Intimacies In Between"

Recommended Critical Reading:

Nadia Ellis, "Andrew Salkey and the Queer Diasporic" in Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora 95-146 and notes

Required Reading:

Saleem Haddad, Guapa

Mark Gevisser, "Maha and Amira's Story: Cairo-Istanbul-Amsterdam" in The Pink Line: Journeys across the World's Queer Frontiers, chapter 6.

Required Critical Reading:

Nadia Atia, "Queering the Arab Spring: Belonging in Saleem Haddad's Guapa," Wasafiri 34.2 (June 2019): 54-60.

Recommended Viewing:

Half A Life, dir. Tamara Shogaolu (13 minutes).

Recommended Critical Reading:

Ghassan Moussawi, "Queer Exceptionalism and Exclusion: Cosmopolitanism and Inequalities in 'Gay-friendly' Beirut," Sociological Review 66.1 (2018): 174-90.

Mehmet Sinan Birdal, "The State of Being LGBT in the Age of Reaction: Post-2011 Visibility and Repression in the Middle East and North Africa" in The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics

Joseph A. Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World" in Desiring Arabs 160-190.

WIKIPEDIA ENTRY ASSIGNMENT DUE (Non-finalists)

ANALYTICAL ESSAY ASSIGNMENT DUE (Finalists)

METHODS OF ASSESSMENT:

Year 2:

• 1,000-word short response to course material (20%, due Week Five);
• Revision to a Wikipedia entry relating to the course material (10%, presentations throughout term; written analysis due by Week 10);
• 3,000-word essay (70%, due at the start of Term 2)

Finalists:

• A 1,000-word analytical essay on an independently chosen non-literary text (such as a film, work of art or music, webpage, phone app, game, etc.) not included on the module, to include a rationale for whether/why the module might expand to include this text in future (30%, due Week 10 )
• One 3,500-word essay with an explicit use of theory and criticism (70%, due at the start of term 2)