2
2021-22
ENGL60971: Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Week 8: Seminar Questions
General guidance for all weeks
Write a short paragraph that summarises the argument of everything we read this semester. Putting things into your own words really helps with learning.
If you feel a little lost, identify a key passage (even one sentence) and spend time working out what you think it means or why you find it troubling or provocative.
As you read, always make a note of passages that seem interesting to you. Are there things that don’t make sense, that don’t add up, that you feel particularly compelled by? These are the kinds of thing to bring to seminar discussions.
In addition, write a paragraph response to each of the questions below.
Seminar questions
This week I would like each of us to take responsibility for writing a detailed summary of one of the set readings (everyone still has to read everything though ) I would also like each person to choose one passage from the reading that they are assigned that we might close read as a group. We will start the seminar by inviting people to collectively summarise the reading they are assigned. See separate email for who is assigned to which reading.
So…should we always be intersectional?
Which forms of suffering does Frank Wilderson III claim are singular in the context of the US? Can you articulate the implications of what he argues for intersectionality?
Puar and Nash articulate many limitations of the paradigm of intersectionality. Pick out one that you agree with and one that you don’t.
Below is a passage from the Eng, Halberstam and Munoz essay (which is not essential reading for this week.) They argue for expanding the reach of intersectionality within queer studies to take in an ever-wider range of issues. What do you make of this move?
Such emergencies include the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the welfare state; the Bush administration’s infinite “war on terrorism” and the acute militarization of state violence; the escalation of U.S. empire building and the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; the devolution of civil society and the erosion of civil rights; the pathologizing of immigrant communities as “terrorist” and racialized populations as “criminal”; the shifting forms of citizenship and migration in a putatively “postidentity” and “postracial” age; the politics of intimacy and the liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as a pro- phylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. Indeed, in this intense time of war and death, and of U.S. unilat- eralismand corporate domination, queer studies now more than ever needs to refocus its critical attentions on public debates about the meaning of democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and com- munity, and the alien and the human in all their national and their global manifestations.
What does queer studies have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism? What does queer studies tell us about immigration, citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights?
David L. Eng, J. Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz. “Introduction” in “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”, eds. Eng, Halberstam and Munoz. Social Text 23.3-4 (2005): 1-17 (p.2)