Introduction to LGBTQ Studies

Fall 2022

Professor Lindsay Thomas

lindsaythomas@miami.edu, lxt308@miami.edu

Office Hours

Wed, 2-4 pm, and by appointment, Ashe 307

Course Description

This course invites you to consider how sexuality has been historically, culturally, aesthetically, and politically constructed and contested, particularly during the 20th and 21st centuries, and particularly within the United States. Categories like “gay,” “straight,” “queer” – just like racial and gendered categories – aren’t metaphysical constants describing desires and subjectivities that persist unchanged across time. Rather, these categories are continually invented, transformed, and re-invented in response to historical and cultural exigencies. Thus, this course is as much about history, power, race, class, ability, and privilege as it is about gender, sex, love, desire, and identity. As an introduction to the LGBTQ Studies minor, this course offers a survey of some of the most significant ideas and debates in queer studies; it showcases both classic and more contemporary examples of queer literature and film; and it invites you to think critically about the possibilities that queer writers, thinkers, and activists have been dreaming for themselves against what Michael Warner terms cis- white heteropatriarchy’s “fear of a queer planet.”

You can download a PDF of our course syllabus via our class Blackboard site and/or our class Google drive folder.