Queer Feelings

Appropriate for FY students- Is it high time we lean into our unpleasant feelings: exhaustion, loneliness, shame, melancholy, anxiety? Can interrogating our feelings help us better know, even see through, the world as it exists? How do we navigate society, relationships, our own selves with and against feelings? In turn, how might understanding ourselves as entities of feeling first and foremost - as the locus of desires, energies, and reactions - free us from traditional categories of identity and being? Starting with the premise that the way bodies get coded parallels the way feelings and desires get coded ('you're a man, so you must want or like these things'), this course explores how a sustained and rigorous study of feelings might shake loose the sex/gender system in which we find ourselves and open up the room to exit in more fluid, multiple, and compassionate ways. A brief introduction to "queer theory" and "affect theory" will provide us with some methods and terms to engage with the works of queer writers such as Maggie Nelson, Quentin Crisp, Thom Gunn, Olga Broumas, Christopher Isherwood, Audre Lorde, and Jeanette Winterson, to name a few. Cross-listed with Gender and Sexuality Studies.