Transnational Approaches to Gender and S

Since the 1980s, third wave feminists have expanded the feminist project to include perspectives from and attention to women outside the West. In more recent decades, a similar movement has happened among queer and trans theorists. In this course, we will engage this work, much of which has been published in the past decade and a half. We will start with provincializing central concepts of feminist and queer theory: gender and sexuality. Taking an intersectional approach that attends to race, class, nation, and other social divisions, we will read scholars who study gender/sexuality around the world, including in Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The readings will draw our attention to the ways in which gender/sexuality are implicated in imperial and post-colonial projects as well as how gender and sexuality operate outside the West, both in practice and identity. Finally, we will consider the possibilities and limitations for studying gender/sexuality beyond our own societies. Critical approaches to gender and sexuality challenge conventional “born this way” narratives about gender and sexual identities as innate. This course will raise questions that will make us uncomfortable and, hopefully, transform our understandings of our own gendered and sexual identities and practices.