WGSS 20.03 Introduction to the Study of Race, Migration, and Sexuality
This course aims to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the ways in which race, migration and sexuality have shaped U.S. culture, social and legal thought, cultural institutions and art practice from the colonial era to the present. Race, migration, and sexuality are experienced differentially across all groups and individuals. They also have distinctive transnational and diasporic histories and practices. This course will focus on the various groups that have comprised the United States in a comparative and decolonial study aligned with the intersectional approach advocated by black feminists. Students will learn about issues of race, migration, and sexuality across time and space, as critical dimensions of the nation’s political and economic structures, within different ethnocultural traditions, and in aesthetic, performance practices. The central object is to weave diverse historical and cultural traditions into a larger synthesis of the meaning of race, migration and sexuality in North American life that is deftly attuned to power in all of its guises and establishmentarian logics.
As a broad introduction to the multi- and inter-disciplinary studies in race, migration, and sexuality, the course will employ “a constellated approach” that will highlight the connections between our interdisciplinary programs with components of study in U.S. ethnicities, genders and indigeneities. It will enable students to think across the fields of Latinx, African, Native and Asian American Studies while also encouraging thinking in global, hemispheric, transnational and decolonial terms. The course will promote interest in border thinking across geographies and practices that demand a fundamental rethinking of existing paradigms with new questions, objects and analytics