GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CULTURE

A comparative course exploring the intersections of literature, psychoanalysis, queer studies, and environmental studies.

Popular environmentalist discourse is often portrayed as the province of misanthropes, lonely-hearts and “kill-joys,” whose “downer” ethics can only be articulated in the negative—as the demand to curb and curtail hedonistic consumption.   This course asks about the odd place of pleasure and desire in environmental literature broadly defined. What kinds of “romances” can be sustained with something called “nature” or with particular places or nonhuman others?  We will give special attention to stories that deviate from the dominant myth of an original fall from paradise and lost plenitude, and that re-imagine ideas of normalcy, home, and community.  Drawing on the multiple senses of “queer,” from its contemporary usage as a term for same-sex sexual orientation to its older meanings (“odd,” “deviant,” “of questionable character,” “oblique”), we will look at texts that break the normative yoking of sexuality to reproduction and offer alternatives lines of transmission and inheritance. We will compare different ways of thinking the relation between “madness” and “civilization” and of imagining community between humans and with other living beings.  We will also examine the surprising convergence of figures of secrecy, shame and lack—from “the gay closet” to the idea of nature as an “open secret”—in queer, gender and environmental studies.

Readings by Bersani, Butler, Carson, Coleridge, Darwin, Deleuze, Edelman, Erikson, Foucault, Freud, Hadot, Haraway, Jewett, Kropotkin, Morton, Malthus, Ovid, Rousseau, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Silverman, Thoreau, Winnicott, William Wordsworth.

Films by Hitchcock, Ang Lee, Herzog, Varda.