Freshman Seminar
Trans-Cultural Histories of the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements
“Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes.”
– A Thousand Plateaus.
This freshman seminar will offer students an opportunity to read primary documents (statements, manifestos, poetry, essays) from the women’s and gay liberation movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. The seminar will draw from multiple traditions, focusing on debates concerning both class antagonisms and histories of racialization within the LGBTQ community, as well as lines of convergence between different movement contexts, including the specific way issues of sex and gender emerged out of the social movements of the earlier 1960s.
Primary questions for weekly discussions will be cross-culture comparisons between feminist, queer, and trans thought in the U.S., France, and Italy, as well as debates within each of these national contexts. In addition, we will consider how our investigations of these histories may inform our sense of the importance of gender and sexuality within liberation movements taking shape today.