Performing Gender and Sexuality examines the role of gender and sexuality in contemporary society and in art, performance, and literature. As such, this module analyses how performance and artistic practices engage with, reveal, challenge, deconstruct, and resist dominant norms of gender and sexuality. Through practical exploration and seminar discussion, students will become familiar with important scholarship in feminist theory, women of colour feminism, and queer and trans theory. Students will develop a stronger critical analytic of how gender, sexuality, as well as race and class, informs and is informed by our current political climate. As such, we will take an intersectional approach to these subjects and interrogate how gender and sexuality are conceived, performed, and policed.
In Term One, we will focus predominantly on grounding ourselves in the way that key terms such as gender, sexuality and feminism have evolved and are being continuously redefined. Rather than organising the module through key feminist movements, we will begin the module by considering how such periodisation and narrativization obfuscate wider feminist struggles. Instead, we will look to thinkers, theorists, artists, and activists who start from the basis that the unequal balance of power in relation to gender always exists at the intersection of other forms of oppression such as class, sexuality, race, and disability. As such, we will look to feminist and queer methodologies, the relationship between gender, sexuality and colonialism, and will spend the final weeks of term considering feminism, gender, and sexuality as they intersect with questions of work, capital and reproduction.
In Term Two, we will animate key questions at the heart of queer of colour critique, queer theory, and trans studies through more thematic topics and ideas, for example, love, pleasure, desire, affect, loss, porn, the archive, and futurity. We will think about the AIDs crisis, questions of embodiment and how bodies come to make meaning in the world. As such, we will think about the historical violences that occur in the gendering and racialisation of the body, especially as this intersects with questions of nation and citizenship, medicine and psychiatry, archive and record, and disability and capacity.