NONBINARY PERSPECTIVES

The course explores nonbinary perspectives through four units: Lineages, Institutions, Culture, and Politics. The first unit will take students through a historically grounded study of where and why we might look for nonbinary in the past, how the existence of a binary and challenges to it have each shaped genealogies of feminist, queer, and trans thought in the past, and how binary and nonbinary figures have been central to the medicine, psychology, and science of sex. The second unit will allow students to examine the interactions between nonbinary gender and institutional structures such as the state, the prison system, academic knowledge, and the built environment, asking whether nonbinary reconceptions of institutions can provide new insight on how to live in relation to them. The third unit will trace the emergence of nonbinary through popular culture, personal experience, and the intersections of race and globalization, asking critical questions about how the rapid flow of culture laid the groundwork for nonbinary’s emergence at the same time as it ensured its potentially uneven distribution. The final unit will encourage students to engage with political stakes of nonbinary, investigating the backlashes against its emergence and exploring what forms of collective politics nonbinary gender might enable. Throughout, students will be asked to actively theorize nonbinary gender and its role in 21st century life and the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality.