Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

Beyond the Charmed Circle
Course Number: 
R1B.003
Course Catalog Number: 
21463
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Howard Fisher
Days: 
Tu/Th
Time: 
9:30-11
Semester: 
Location: 
Remote

In a 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin offers the idea of “the charmed circle” to reimagine how sexualities are stratified within societies in terms of power and visibility. This course takes up Rubin’s concept as the starting point for practicing fundamental critical skills of inquiry, writing, and research. Students will examine novels, short works of fiction, films, and digital media that confront them with how difficult it can be to think clearly about sexuality because of sexuality’s sometimes odd relation to language. For instance, we might take “gay” or “lesbian” to be a relevant term for many of the desires and relations given shape in language through these artistic works, but in nearly every case we would find ourselves making qualifications or doubling back to rearticulate what we mean by these terms. That is, one thing that is “difficult” about these literary texts is how they ask us to consider how the way words stand for things in the world fails to capture the way language actually works in the lived reality of sexuality.

Students’ development as writers and thinkers will take shape around the following questions:
What is meant by sexuality? A kind of person? A desire? A practice?
To what extent do sexualities as social phenomena change over time?
What are the ways in which people can be different one from another, sexually speaking?
When do sexual differences matter politically?
How does sexuality relate to other terms of identification? Here we will be especially
concerned with gender, race, class, and political affiliation.
What does studying sexuality teach us about the relation between language and society?
How do sexualities “show up” in literary texts? How far does studying sexuality in literature
lead us to question the association of truth with appearances?
In addition to pursuing these questions through readings of literary texts, we will support our exploration course topics through regular readings in literary criticism, social theory, and empirical studies of sexuality. Part of the Reading and Composition sequence, the course poses the above questions to teach students how to use writing as a tool for inquiry. Students will be required to write either in or for each class. Students will learn how to develop an inquiry, take a principled position in relation to a problem, how to gather and use textual evidence to support their arguments, how to undertake original research to deepen engagements with literary texts, and how to connect
their arguments to the ideas of other thinkers and writers.

Required Texts:
Plato, Symposium
Nella Larsen, Passing

Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Gertrude Stein, “Melanchta” and “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”
Bei Tong, Beijing Comrades

Films
Ulrike Ottinger, Freak Orlando
Heiner Carow, Coming Out
A course reader will house the theoretical and critical writings that will inform our readings of
literary and visual, and interactive texts. Links to examples of digital mass media will be made
available through a course website.