How do we understand race, ethnicity, gender, diaspora, nationhood, and sexuality as interlocking categories of subject and identity formation? What do we gain from centering the creative and intellectual traditions of queer thinkers of color when addressing some of our most pressing social issues today?

This course will open with Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of the U.S.–Mexico border, at once critiquing the border’s capacity to distort time and space for non-normative subjects and reimagining the metaphoric and resistance-based possibilities of the borderlands. Through this border framework, this course will trace the evolution and key nodes of a mode of intersectional analysis known as queer of color critique (QoCC). Students will read literature alongside criticism to engage with larger social questions concerning racism, geopolitics, empire, and terrorism, as these entwine with personal questions about emotion, embodiment, sex, friendship, and love, as well as literary questions about genre, form, poetics, and representation.

QoCC, importantly, seeks ways to attain economic, gender, racial, and sexual justice in the face of persistent historic inequities within the United States. Justice, therefore, and its many iterations, will guide our discussions this quarter.